The manufacturing industry has identified a new megatrend of mass customization, which is one of the essential goals of Industry 4.0. This megatrend requires the realization of manufacturing that can respond quickly and flexibly to various changing production requirements and ensure the achievement of various quality criteria. However, the manufacturing cannot be realized by conventional manufacturing systems in which reconfigurations need to be performed by skilled engineers. This paper proposes a new reconfigurable manufacturing system concept based on an ultra-flexible transfer system. Particularly, an autonomous mobile robotic manipulator, consisting of a high-performance automated guided vehicle module and a collaborative robotic manipulator module, represents a key component of the system concept. In this context, the focus is on the cooperative control between the modules of the autonomous mobile manipulator, which is essential for high-precision processes (e.g., machining, assembly, measurement, inspection), and its wide operating area. The experimental results confirm that the proposed cooperative control improves the positioning performance of the autonomous mobile manipulator, including the time required for positioning and the positioning accuracy.

The current trends of product customization and repair of high value parts with individual defects demand automation and a high degree of flexibility of the involved manufacturing process chains. To determine the corresponding requirements this paper gives an overview of manufacturing process chains by distinguishing between horizontal and vertical process chains. The established way of modeling and programming processes with CAx systems and existing approaches is shown. Furthermore, the different types of possible adaptions of a manufacturing process chain are shown and considered as a cascaded control loop. Following this it is discussed which key requirements of repair process chains are unresolved by existing approaches. To overcome the deficits this paper introduces repair features which comprise the idea of geometric features and defines analytical auxiliary geometries based on the measurement input data. This meets challenges normally caused by working directly on reconstructed geometries in the form of triangulated surfaces which are prone to artifacts. Embedded into function blocks, this allows the use of traditional approaches for manufacturing process chains to be applied to adaptive repair process chains

In many industries the focus in CAx based manufacturing has changed from fixed process chains to ones which can adapt to dynamic inputs. This way process chains can take measurement data into account to produce optimal results. Unfortunately, existing approaches do not integrate well with the existing CAx systems since they do not ensure that existing processes will be kept unchanged. This restriction leads to a low adaption rate in some industries. Especially in the aerospace industry every change in the manufacturing processes will result in high costs. In this paper it is shown that an extended function block approach can be integrated with existing CAx systems while allowing the modeling and controlling of adaptive process chains with reduced data loss at the same time. In order to achieve this goal, data port manifests are introduced which announce supported data formats and features of the corresponding function block. This extension reduces information loss at system interfaces and helps to ensure that required data will be transferred between function blocks. A case study will show how this extension can be used in a common CAx system

Kurzfassung Die spanende Fertigung komplexer Rotationsbauteile ist sehr aufwändig, weswegen die Geometrien häufig auf Kosten der Effizienz vereinfacht werden. Erst durch den Einsatz von Sonderbearbeitungszentren und -werkzeugen ist eine Fertigung der komplexen Geometrien realisierbar. Es entstehen allerdings hohe Kosten für die Herstellung der Sonderwerkzeuge. Ziel des Vorhabens „OpToRoMill“ war die Entwicklung einer CAx-Prozesskette, welche die Fertigung mit herkömmlichen Vollhartmetallfräsern ermöglicht.