<title>Collaborating agents in agile teleoperated and automated microassembly systems</title>

Abstract

Globalization and miniaturization - these trends in production technology cause R&D activities, focused on agile microassembly systems with autonomous subcomponents. Besides product and processes flexibility, agility in small production volumes can be mainly achieved by controlling the system in different operational modes and switching between those in an efficient way. Therefore an agile micro-assembly structure is presented, which can be controlled both in manual mode by teleoperation and in semi-automatic mode. To assure a highly efficient use of production resources in all operational modes, several cooperating sensor components have been developed. Thus a human operator can focus on the main processes, while secondary processes like adjusting and calibrating of sensor-modules are controlled by autonomous functions. In automatically controlled systems the same agents can speed up the main production processes and minimize set up times. In order to switch simply between manual and automatic mode, a smart teaching procedure is integrated into the control framework.