A STEP-NC compliant robotic machining platform for advanced manufacturing

Abstract

In the era of advanced, intelligent, and flexible manufacturing, machining with industrial robots, it is expected to be set up in the next few years. This is due to the vast progress of these robots in terms of precision and stiffness. Moreover, there is a recent development of off-line programming. Consequently, industrial robots offer a real gain of modularity, flexibility, and access for machining on production lines, and are viable solutions to improve the productivity. At the same time, all the potentials of CAD/CAM solutions available for machining off-line programming are not fully exploited because of old G-code (ISO 6963, 1980) language that only enables the description of elementary actions and tools moves. In the context of Industry 4.0 and the development of smart equipments at all levels of production chain, the manufacturing digital thread has to be profoundly reconsidered in order to guarantee high-level information from the design to the manufacturing. In this paper, a solution is proposed based on the high-level programming STEP-NC standard combined with a suitable CAD/CAM solution for industrial robots machining. A complete platform has been developed to enable advanced and intelligent manufacturing with the possibility to integrate several modules of simulation, optimization, and visualization, as well as in-process fabrication adaptation, cloud manufacturing, and machine learning with database analytics.