Abstract
The manufacturing industry is seeing an increase in demand for more custom-made, low-volume production. This type of production is rarely automated and is to a large extent still performed manually. To keep up with the competition and market demands, manufacturers will have to undertake the effort to automate such manufacturing processes. However, automating low-volume production is no small feat as the solution should be adaptable and future proof to unexpected changes in customers’ demands. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable robot workcell aimed at automating low-volume production. The developed workcell can adapt to the changes in manufacturing processes by employing a number of passive, reconfigurable hardware elements, supported by the ROS-based, modular control software. To further facilitate and expedite the setup process, we integrated intuitive, user-friendly robot programming methods with the available hardware. The system was evaluated by implementing five production processes from different manufacturing industries.
Highlights
In a diverse global market, the ability to adapt to increasingly frequent changes in clients’ demands has become crucial to maintain competitiveness
To enable fast construction of new fingers, we developed a new approach to design, manufacture, evaluate, and re-design gripper fingers [36]
All the components that make up these blocks have to be pre-loaded on the development computer. To tackle these issues in a manner that preserves the principle of software reconfigurability, we developed State Machine Assembler (SMACHA) framework that can compile executable programs based on top-level scripts and low-level templates
Summary
In a diverse global market, the ability to adapt to increasingly frequent changes in clients’ demands has become crucial to maintain competitiveness. By enabling physical interaction with humans, collaborative robots introduce new skill and task-level robot programming methods These new approaches make robots a viable part of the array of reconfigurable modules within an RMS. Kinesthetic guidance is defined as a process where a human operator holds the robot and physically guides it through the desired movement It is effective especially for programming robot skills [26,27], and for other tasks such as workcell calibration. We explain how the PbD paradigm based on kinesthetic teaching can be tightly integrated with reconfigurable hardware and ROS-based software infrastructure to realize a workcell that can be set-up for new production tasks quickly.
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