An Overview of Industrial Robots Control and Programming Approaches

Nowadays, manufacturing plants are required to be flexible to respond quickly to customer demands, adapting production and processes without affecting their efficiency. In this context, Industrial Robots (IRs) are a primary resource for modern factories due to their versatility which allows the execution of flexible, reconfigurable, and zero-defect manufacturing tasks. Even so, the control and programming of the commercially available IRs are limiting factors for their effective implementation, especially for dynamic production environments or when complex applications are required. These issues have stimulated the development of new technologies that support more efficient methods for robot control and programming. The goal of this research is to identify and evaluate the main approaches proposed in scientific papers and by the robotics industry in the last decades. After a critical review of the standard IR control schematic, the paper discusses the available control alternatives and summarizes their characteristics, range of applications, and remaining limitations

Adaptive Robot Framework: Providing Versatility and Autonomy to Manufacturing Robots Through FSM, Skills and Agents

207 p.The main conclusions that can be extracted from an analysis of the current situation and future trends of the industry,in particular manufacturing plants, are the following: there is a growing need to provide customization of products, ahigh variation of production volumes and a downward trend in the availability of skilled operators due to the ageingof the population. Adapting to this new scenario is a challenge for companies, especially small and medium-sizedenterprises (SMEs) that are suffering first-hand how their specialization is turning against them.The objective of this work is to provide a tool that can serve as a basis to face these challenges in an effective way.Therefore the presented framework, thanks to its modular architecture, allows focusing on the different needs of eachparticular company and offers the possibility of scaling the system for future requirements. The presented platform isdivided into three layers, namely: interface with robot systems, the execution engine and the application developmentlayer.Taking advantage of the provided ecosystem by this framework, different modules have been developed in order toface the mentioned challenges of the industry. On the one hand, to address the need of product customization, theintegration of tools that increase the versatility of the cell are proposed. An example of such tools is skill basedprogramming. By applying this technique a process can be intuitively adapted to the variations or customizations thateach product requires. The use of skills favours the reuse and generalization of developed robot programs.Regarding the variation of the production volumes, a system which permits a greater mobility and a faster reconfigurationis necessary. If in a certain situation a line has a production peak, mechanisms for balancing the loadwith a reasonable cost are required. In this respect, the architecture allows an easy integration of different roboticsystems, actuators, sensors, etc. In addition, thanks to the developed calibration and set-up techniques, the system canbe adapted to new workspaces at an effective time/cost.With respect to the third mentioned topic, an agent-based monitoring system is proposed. This module opens up amultitude of possibilities for the integration of auxiliary modules of protection and security for collaboration andinteraction between people and robots, something that will be necessary in the not so distant future.For demonstrating the advantages and adaptability improvement of the developed framework, a series of real usecases have been presented. In each of them different problematic has been resolved using developed skills,demonstrating how are adapted easily to the different casuistic

Introduction to an Efficient Process for Automatic Offline Pro-gram Generation for a Robotic Spot Welding Assembly Line.

One of the most important applications of industrial robots is spot welding which is used in high production applications mostly in automotive industries where mass production is required. The speed, precision, efficiency and the resulting cost reduction due to mass production are well accepted and well documented advantages of automation of spot welding process using robots. In order to meet the new challenges of increased global competition, manufacturers are forced to seek new technologies for improved production and cost reduction. Such cost cutting efforts can only be achieved by improving the offline programming method. Offline programming is one of the most crucial parts of modern automotive manufacturing process. In this Master’s thesis a process was developed for faster and efficient offline programming of industrial manipulators in spot welding application. The thesis work has been conducted in Visual Components Oy, Espoo, Finland. In traditional practice there are lots of manual steps involved in the robotic spot welding area. The whole process design of the robotic spot welding is not simple and includes CAD design of the part, shape and complexity of the parts which needs to be spot weld, design of the robot work cell, design and selection of spot weld gun, required production rate, offline programming tool, robot calibration, work cell calibration, work piece positioner design etc. In this report an approach to implement the offline programming of robot based on simulation software with the process knowledge of car-body in white was proposed and partially developed. Some common problems such as motion simulation, collision detection and calibration can be partly solved by this approach. The thesis consisted of a theoretical section to investigate the current state of art of offline programming tools and methods and a practical section to develop working prototype for demonstration. The implementation of the prototype used the application programmer’s interface (API) available with the simulation software. A prototype was developed to propose an efficient process for putting the whole spot welding process starting for CAD design, work cell setup, offline programming and calibration in a closed loop

Engineering framework for service-oriented automation systems

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Engineering methods and tools for cyber–physical automation systems

Much has been published about potential benefits of the adoption of cyber–physical systems (CPSs) in manufacturing industry. However, less has been said about how such automation systems might be effectively configured and supported through their lifecycles and how application modeling, visualization, and reuse of such systems might be best achieved. It is vitally important to be able to incorporate support for engineering best practice while at the same time exploiting the potential that CPS has to offer in an automation systems setting. This paper considers the industrial context for the engineering of CPS. It reviews engineering approaches that have been proposed or adopted to date including Industry 4.0 and provides examples of engineering methods and tools that are currently available. The paper then focuses on the CPS engineering toolset being developed by the Automation Systems Group (ASG) in the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K. and explains via an industrial case study how such a component-based engineering toolset can support an integrated approach to the virtual and physical engineering of automation systems through their lifecycle via a method that enables multiple vendors' equipment to be effectively integrated and provides support for the specification, validation, and use of such systems across the supply chain, e.g., between end users and system integrators

A multi-agent architecture for plug and produce on an industrial assembly platform

YesModern manufacturing companies face increased pressures to adapt to shorter product life cycles and the need to reconfigure more frequently their production systems to offer new product variants. This paper proposes a new multi-agent architecture utilising “plug and produce” principles for configuration and reconfiguration of production systems with minimum human intervention. A new decision-making approach for system reconfiguration based on tasks re-allocation is presented using goal driven methods. The application of the proposed architecture is described with a number of architectural views and its deployment is illustrated using a validation scenario implemented on an industrial assembly platform. The proposed methodology provides an innovative application of a multi-agent control environment and architecture with the objective of significantly reducing the time for deployment and ramp-up of small footprint assembly systems.The reported research has been part of the EU FP7 research project “PRIME

A component-based virtual engineering approach to PLC code generation for automation systems

In recent years, the automotive industry has been significantly affected by a number of challenges driven by globalisation, economic fluctuations, environmental awareness and rapid technological developments. As a consequence, product lifecycles are shortening and customer demands are becoming more diverse. To survive in such a business environment, manufacturers are striving to find a costeffective solution for fast and efficient development and reconfiguration of manufacturing systems to satisfy the needs of changing markets without losses in production. Production systems within automotive industry are vastly automated and heavily rely on PLC-based control systems. It has been established that one of the major obstacles in realising reconfigurable manufacturing systems is the fragmented engineering approach to implement control systems. Control engineering starts at a very late stage in the overall system engineering process and remains highly isolated from the mechanical design and build of the system. During this stage, control code is typically written manually in vendor-specific tools in a combination of IEC 61131-3 languages. Writing control code is a complex, time consuming and error-prone process. [Continues.

The augmented reality framework : an approach to the rapid creation of mixed reality environments and testing scenarios

Debugging errors during real-world testing of remote platforms can be time consuming and expensive when the remote environment is inaccessible and hazardous such as deep-sea. Pre-real world testing facilities, such as Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL), are often not available due to the time and expense necessary to create them. Testing facilities tend to be monolithic in structure and thus inflexible making complete redesign necessary for slightly different uses. Redesign is simpler in the short term than creating the required architecture for a generic facility. This leads to expensive facilities, due to reinvention of the wheel, or worse, no testing facilities. Without adequate pre-real world testing, integration errors can go undetected until real world testing where they are more costly to diagnose and rectify, e.g. especially when developing Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs). This thesis introduces a novel framework, the Augmented Reality Framework (ARF), for rapid construction of virtual environments for Augmented Reality tasks such as Pure Simulation, HIL, Hybrid Simulation and real world testing. ARF’s architecture is based on JavaBeans and is therefore inherently generic, flexible and extendable. The aim is to increase the performance of constructing, reconfiguring and extending virtual environments, and consequently enable more mature and stable systems to be developed in less time due to previously undetectable faults being diagnosed earlier in the pre-real-world testing phase. This is only achievable if test harnesses can be created quickly and easily, which in turn allows the developer to visualise more system feedback making faults easier to spot. Early fault detection and less wasted real world testing leads to a more mature, stable and less expensive system. ARF provides guidance on how to connect and configure user made components, allowing for rapid prototyping and complex virtual environments to be created quickly and easily. In essence, ARF tries to provide intuitive construction guidance which is similar in nature to LEGOR pieces which can be so easily connected to form useful configurations. ARF is demonstrated through case studies which show the flexibility and applicability of ARF to testing techniques such as HIL for UUVs. In addition, an informal study was carried out to asses the performance increases attributable to ARF’s core concepts. In comparison to classical programming methods ARF’s average performance increase was close to 200%. The study showed that ARF was incredibly intuitive since the test subjects were novices in ARF but experts in programming. ARF provides key contributions in the field of HIL testing of remote systems by providing more accessible facilities that allow new or modified testing scenarios to be created where it might not have been feasible to do so before. In turn this leads to early detection of faults which in some cases would not have ever been detected before