New concepts in automation and robotic technology for surface engineering

Nowadays, the use of robots for the automation of process is very common. This is due to the advantages provided: cost reduction, quality increase, high reproducibility, etc. Nevertheless the robots have the disadvantage, that a high initial investment is necessary. Thermal spraying processes use industrial robots for many reasons, some of them are: high control of the process, quality increase, dangerous work environment, etc. The industrial robot can control many parameters during the process; like the trajectory and the velocity of the torch, which have a significant influence on the heat and mass transfer to the piece and coating. Properties such as coating thickness, porosity, micro hardness and thermal stress distribution are therefore significantly influenced by the spraying distance, velocity and trajectory. It is thus necessary to implement new tools, which support robot programming and fulfill the requirements of torch handling for thermal spraying and lacquered operation. Optimized robot programming is necessary for high quality products regarding coating properties and functionality. To optimize the robot programming, different off-line programming tools are used. The off-line programming has the advantages: increase of work safety and efficiency, low time to program, continuous production, etc.Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería IndustrialUniversidad Politécnica de CartagenaInstitute for Manufacturing Technologies of Ceramic Components and Composites (IMTCCC; University of Stuttgart

APPLICATION OF SIMULATION MODELS FOR PROGRAMMING OF ROBOTS

In recent years, there has been an increasing robotization of many areas of life. This requires knowledge of issues related to robots and their programming. Devices of this type, especially large industrial or medical robots, are very expensive, or they may be hardly affordable for educational purposes. Simulation models are helpful in such situation. The aim of the article is to present the possibilities of using simulation models of robots and robotic stations in the educational and research process. Specialized software packages make it easier not only to understand how robots work, but they also allow to test different operating conditions of the designed computer model of the real robotized process

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

Mechatronic Systems

Mechatronics, the synergistic blend of mechanics, electronics, and computer science, has evolved over the past twenty five years, leading to a novel stage of engineering design. By integrating the best design practices with the most advanced technologies, mechatronics aims at realizing high-quality products, guaranteeing at the same time a substantial reduction of time and costs of manufacturing. Mechatronic systems are manifold and range from machine components, motion generators, and power producing machines to more complex devices, such as robotic systems and transportation vehicles. With its twenty chapters, which collect contributions from many researchers worldwide, this book provides an excellent survey of recent work in the field of mechatronics with applications in various fields, like robotics, medical and assistive technology, human-machine interaction, unmanned vehicles, manufacturing, and education. We would like to thank all the authors who have invested a great deal of time to write such interesting chapters, which we are sure will be valuable to the readers. Chapters 1 to 6 deal with applications of mechatronics for the development of robotic systems. Medical and assistive technologies and human-machine interaction systems are the topic of chapters 7 to 13.Chapters 14 and 15 concern mechatronic systems for autonomous vehicles. Chapters 16-19 deal with mechatronics in manufacturing contexts. Chapter 20 concludes the book, describing a method for the installation of mechatronics education in schools

Enhanced online programming for industrial robots

The use of robots and automation levels in the industrial sector is expected to grow, and is driven by the on-going need for lower costs and enhanced productivity. The manufacturing industry continues to seek ways of realizing enhanced production, and the programming of articulated production robots has been identified as a major area for improvement. However, realizing this automation level increase requires capable programming and control technologies. Many industries employ offline-programming which operates within a manually controlled and specific work environment. This is especially true within the high-volume automotive industry, particularly in high-speed assembly and component handling. For small-batch manufacturing and small to medium-sized enterprises, online programming continues to play an important role, but the complexity of programming remains a major obstacle for automation using industrial robots. Scenarios that rely on manual data input based on real world obstructions require that entire production systems cease for significant time periods while data is being manipulated, leading to financial losses. The application of simulation tools generate discrete portions of the total robot trajectories, while requiring manual inputs to link paths associated with different activities. Human input is also required to correct inaccuracies and errors resulting from unknowns and falsehoods in the environment. This study developed a new supported online robot programming approach, which is implemented as a robot control program. By applying online and offline programming in addition to appropriate manual robot control techniques, disadvantages such as manual pre-processing times and production downtimes have been either reduced or completely eliminated. The industrial requirements were evaluated considering modern manufacturing aspects. A cell-based Voronoi generation algorithm within a probabilistic world model has been introduced, together with a trajectory planner and an appropriate human machine interface. The robot programs so achieved are comparable to manually programmed robot programs and the results for a Mitsubishi RV-2AJ five-axis industrial robot are presented. Automated workspace analysis techniques and trajectory smoothing are used to accomplish this. The new robot control program considers the working production environment as a single and complete workspace. Non-productive time is required, but unlike previously reported approaches, this is achieved automatically and in a timely manner. As such, the actual cell-learning time is minimal

Occupational health and safety issues in human-robot collaboration: State of the art and open challenges

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) refers to the interaction of workers and robots in a shared workspace. Owing to the integration of the industrial automation strengths with the inimitable cognitive capabilities of humans, HRC is paramount to move towards advanced and sustainable production systems. Although the overall safety of collaborative robotics has increased over time, further research efforts are needed to allow humans to operate alongside robots, with awareness and trust. Numerous safety concerns are open, and either new or enhanced technical, procedural and organizational measures have to be investigated to design and implement inherently safe and ergonomic automation solutions, aligning the systems performance and the human safety. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis and a literature review are carried out in the present paper to provide a comprehensive overview of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) issues in HRC. As a result, the most researched topics and application areas, and the possible future lines of research are identified. Reviewed articles stress the central role played by humans during collaboration, underlining the need to integrate the human factor in the hazard analysis and risk assessment. Human-centered design and cognitive engineering principles also require further investigations to increase the worker acceptance and trust during collaboration. Deepened studies are compulsory in the healthcare sector, to investigate the social and ethical implications of HRC. Whatever the application context is, the implementation of more and more advanced technologies is fundamental to overcome the current HRC safety concerns, designing low-risk HRC systems while ensuring the system productivity

Синтез та дослідження системи керування промисловим роботом компанії Fanuc в умовах безперервного виробництва

Object of research: to design a robotic automatic system applied to a production process in an industrial environment by using a simulation software tool. The purpose of the project: the study and analysis of the capabilities and advantages offered by current tools for offline simulation in production environments compared to programming carried out in the real environment. The entire robotic system is a continuous system that constantly analyzes the state of the system, its position and its entry and exit signals. The positioning accuracy of the robot in the simulation program is 0.001 mm, the positioning accuracy of the real robot is 0.05 mm. To implement the process, one must assimilate and understand the programming methods that the simulation tool supports, as well as the different functionalities and configuration options of this software to carry out the entire process virtually. In this way, the real process will be carried out in a simulated way, having previously carried out the total configuration of the system: definition of robot tools, specification of reference systems, definition of parts and objects, definition of fixed parts, definition of points, the tracing of the different trajectories. The robotic system implemented by simulating the process will be analyzed. It will also be intended to carry out an expansion in the implemented system to evaluate the ability to insert changes in the work cell through the use of the simulation tool. The concept of simultaneous engineering applied to industrial environments capable of implementing robotic simulation in their production lines will be analyzed and will be represented general software development methodology. After carrying out this project, we must be able to face the "offline" programming of a workcell applied to the production of an industrial plant

Learning Practically Feasible Policies for Online 3D Bin Packing

We tackle the Online 3D Bin Packing Problem, a challenging yet practically useful variant of the classical Bin Packing Problem. In this problem, the items are delivered to the agent without informing the full sequence information. Agent must directly pack these items into the target bin stably without changing their arrival order, and no further adjustment is permitted. Online 3D-BPP can be naturally formulated as Markov Decision Process (MDP). We adopt deep reinforcement learning, in particular, the on-policy actor-critic framework, to solve this MDP with constrained action space. To learn a practically feasible packing policy, we propose three critical designs. First, we propose an online analysis of packing stability based on a novel stacking tree. It attains a high analysis accuracy while reducing the computational complexity from $O(N^2)$ to $O(N \log N)$, making it especially suited for RL training. Second, we propose a decoupled packing policy learning for different dimensions of placement which enables high-resolution spatial discretization and hence high packing precision. Third, we introduce a reward function that dictates the robot to place items in a far-to-near order and therefore simplifies the collision avoidance in movement planning of the robotic arm. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive discussion on several key implemental issues. The extensive evaluation demonstrates that our learned policy outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly and is practically usable for real-world applications.Comment: Science China Information Science

Development of a robot-based magnetic flux leakage inspection system

Surface cracking is one of the primary factors leading to failure of mechanical components. One of the most sensitive methods for surface or near surface crack detection is MFL inspection. Magnetic sensor based MFL inspection, MSI, has shown many advantageous over MPI and gives the opportunity for automated MFL inspection after its equivalent detectability to MPI is validated. A standard industrial robot is introduced and applied in this work as an automated solution for precise sensor guidance and a more accurate, flexible and efficient automatic MSI system is developed as an extension of the already existing automatic MFL inspection scheme at IZFP. Performance of the system is demonstrated by applying the system on different inspection situations of concern. The measurement results obtained validate the application of the system on the inspection.Oberflächenrisse sind eine der wichtigsten Faktoren, die zum Versagen von mechanischen Komponenten führen können. Eine der empfindlichsten Methoden für Überprüfung von Oberflächen auf Risse im Bereich der Werkstückoberfläche ist die magnetische Streuflussprüfung. Die auf dem Magnetsensor basierte magnetische Streuflussprüfung, MSI, hat viele Vorteile bei der praktischen Anwendung gegenüber MPI gezeigt und bietet die Möglichkeit zur automatisierten MFL mit dem Gegenwert der Validierung des MPI Verfahrens. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Standard-Industrieroboter vorgestellt, welcher für eine automatisierte Lösung zur Prüfungsdurchführung verwendet wird. So kann die präzise Sensorführung für ein genaues, flexibles und effizientes automatisches MSI-System gewährleistet werden. Das System dient auch als Erweiterung zu den bereits bestehenden automatischen MFL Prüfsystem besteht. Schließlich wird die Leistungsfähigkeit des Gesamtsystems durch die Anwendungen in unterschiedlichen Prüfsituationen demonstriert. Die erhaltenen Prüfergebnisse bestätigen die Anwendung des Systems als Grundlage für unterschiedliche Prüfaufgaben im mechanisierten Prüfbetrieb auch im Produktionsprozeß