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The Three-Day-Deployable Integrated Robot System
FlexPicker installation
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Robot work cells should adapt to variations in production flow or in maintaining the production rate in the presence of uncertainties. When the physical or logical layout of the production process has to be restructured or when new equipment is installed, SME employees, who today do not engineer robotized production, should be able to compose and configure the equipment. Work cells should be adaptable in case of work-piece variations or reconfigured when production volume or product changes occur. The goal is to create work cell designs resulting in ‘zero-changeover time’ when adapting or reconfiguring to product variants, and the deployment of a typical robot work cell within less than three days (instead of weeks). Several concepts of self-configurable work cells have been suggested in the past with little success, mainly owing to high costs of the modular components, lack of compatibility with third-party components, shortcomings in the robot‘s intelligence for dealing with variable product geometries/locations/processes, and owing to lack of integration of planning and configuration tools within typical CAD systems.
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Mechanisms and Architecture for Plug-and-Produce
To be able to plug and produce without operator intervention, there is a need for standardized protocols and software interfaces, which allow the automatic configuration of all components upon setup of the workcell. Grippers, tools, sensors, part transport and feeding devices have to be automatically interfaced to the cell, initiated and started. The consortium has the power to set European and worldwide standards for these interfaces and plug-and-produce mechanisms. The software mechanisms needed to support such radically improved flexibility differs from current practices in that fragile/hard-coded implementations are replaced by secure software techniques.
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Robot Task Generation based on Product/Process Data
Programs and process information should be generated from CAD data, in addition to intuitive instruction schemes. Both user and CAD input need to be combined and converted into task instructions that can be understood by the robotic workcell. The generated motions from ideal CAD data have to be adjusted to current workpiece and process requirements. Thus, the adaptation of the robot requires adaptation and optimization of trajectories and process data. First algorithms are available, but need to be better integrated with sensor-based motion control and the programming system in general. The consortium has novel ideas, which make fast, easy and intuitive calibration of CAD data to cell equipment, tools and work objects possible without any measuring devices. The robot operator can make use of process models and CAD geometries without knowing anything about CAD systems or the process model representations. This also means full coherence between on-line and off-line representation, and SMEs can make direct use of process and geometry data from more advanced customers.
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