Flexible Manufacturing Cell: development, coordination, integration and control

Abstract

This paper describes the development, coordination, integration and control of a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC). FMC has industrial characteristics and was developed to study these types of manufacturing systems. The FMC hierarchical structure is based on five layers: engineering, planning, scheduling, control and data acquisition. The connection of all of the equipment in the FMC (manufacturing equipment and information processing) is carried out via computer network Ethernet. The connection of all the equipments in FMC (manufacturing equipment and processing of information) is done through a computer network Ethernet. In this work we present the layout, the hierarchical structure and the four sectors (manufacturing, assembly, handling and storage) that make up FMC. For the coordination, integration and control of FMC several software programmes and hardware were created. An interface was developed - direct numerical control (DNC) to control the CNC machines used in FMC. For the robots used in the FMC the winATS and RAPComm applications were developed.