Preliminary development of a system to manipulate and monitoring a flexible manufacturing cell

Abstract

Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) are more commonly used in modern industry due to the benefits offered, such as: low-cost production, easy adaptation to elaborate different products according to the client necessities. A Flexible Manufacturing Cell (FMC) has two or three workstations; moreover, a system to control and manipulate de process. Industrial communications protocols are used to communicate workstations of a FMC, such as: Profibus, Ethernet, Device Net, etc. For the case of not have such protocol to communicate devices, due to an incompatibility between protocols, an alternative solution has been implemented in order to perform the same function. In this work, is presented the obtained results of a preliminary development of a system capable to manipulate and monitoring a flexible manufacturing cell using a communication card using a microcontroller to communicate a HAAS VF2 machining center and a FANUC robot M6iB. Moreover, an user interface is developed using LabVIEW with a web cam, which communicates with the microcontroller via RS-232, with the capability of monitoring the system via internet.