Collaborative and robot-based plug & produce for rapid reconfiguration of modular production systems

Abstract

The manufacturing of individualized products down to batch size 1 poses ongoing challenges for the design and integration of future production systems. Today's production lines with a high degree of automation achieve high efficiency, but usually come with high costs for adaptation to product variants. In order to combine full automation with high flexibility, we propose a concept for the dynamic composition of automation components in a modular production system that facilitates the rapid adaptation of collaborative and robotsupported manufacturing processes. To achieve this, we integrate self-descriptive automation components at runtime into the control architecture of the production system using a Plugand-Produce approach. While the location and orientation of automation components in the modular production system are derived from physical human-robot interaction, the adaptation and verification of the robot behavior is made possible through a simulation-based planning subsystem. Once this dynamic reconfiguration process by the machine setter is finished, the adapted production process is executed in a fully automated way with high efficiency. A case study carried out in an industrial collaboration project on flexible assembly demonstrates the benefits of the presented approach.

Human–Robot Collaboration in Manufacturing Applications: A Review

“…Position control systems were only used for traditional industrial robots, often using extra vision systems for safety reasons. Due to the inherent compliance of cobots, impedance control was more commonly chosen for these systems, though in many cases where an inherently compliant cobot was used, vision was also included for feedback [31][32][33]. Robot compliance can often be a trade-off with robot precision, so including a separate channel for feedback to monitor collisions and increase safety can be a useful method of maintaining manipulation performance.…”

“…This is likely due to the prevalence of new cobots and sensing methodologies coming onto the market, maturing algorithms, and experience in designing collaborative workcells. Many of the reviewed works highlight future work in terms of the method they used, whether it be by increasing the complexity of their modeling of the operator and/or environment [48], or using different metrics to evaluate performance [33,49,50] and task choice [51]. Others believe that expanding their research setup to other application areas is the next step [31,45,52].…”

Assisted Planning and Setup of Collaborative Robot Applications in Modular Production Systems

“…This contribution is based on our previous work 1 combining industrial aspects with active operator assistance in a Modular Production System (MPS) using a collaborative robot for material handling [14], [15]. Further, the co-bot is facilitated for the rapid reconfiguration of the modular workspace.…”

“…A frame provider organizes the working points for the robot and updates the transformation tree of dynamically placed and plugged-in components during the workspace exploration, initial setup or reconfiguration of the production system. F i n a l D r a f t A detailed description on the Modular Production System and the Plug-and-Produce process for an automated the robotbased production was published in our previous work [15].…”

Plug, Plan and Produce as Enabler for Easy Workcell Setup and Collaborative Robot Programming in Smart Factories

“…The necessary frames are programmed interactively using kinesthetic teaching before a new production plan is executed. Detailed work on the architecture and the technology of the Plug-and-Produce concept was published in [30].…”