Recent Developments in Manufacturing Robotic Systems and Automation

The mechanical design is composed of certain stages that are defined by every designer following his/her personal method and experiences. The work can be divided as much as necessary from the study of system requirements to the manufactory. The design quality depends of the work developed in every stage and the number of these steps provides the level of design accuracy. The results of design process with enough effective stages are accurate and fulfil the requirements that have been built for. The stage number, which can be defined as work to develop, should be just the necessary for a successful design. This chapter presents a novel design method composed of suitable phases that generate feasible mechanical designs of robotic systems. Examples of robotic systems designed by applying this method have been illustrated. The experimental tests of these systems operation illustrate successful results that validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The new emerging trends in supply chain management have changed across the supply chain the role of the warehouse and the related activities. Warehouse managers report a significant increase in the number of SKUs (stock keeping unit) to manage, along with a reduction in size of orders delivered and, as a consequence, an increase in the incidence of order picking. Order Picking can be defined as the selective retrieval of unit loads from high level unit loads or of pieces or cases from racks in order to fulfill customer orders. Examples are the retrieval of cases from pallet unit load or the retrieval of pieces from cases. In this context growing attention is placed on questions such as “why automate?” and “where is the return?”. Even though the automation in material handling systems began in the early ‘60s and ‘70, nowadays it is no more a question of fashion or innovation: deciding whether to automate or not usually requires a deep investigation on which factors need to be considered before automating. The topic of automation is even more critical with respect to order picking, where the importance and the complexity of the of the picking activity have induced material handling system suppliers to introduce increasing numbers of solutions with ever greater levels of automation. This chapter presents the main solutions to design Order Picking Systems (OPSs). In particular, after illustrating a general framework to design OPS, the pros and cons of the main automatic solutions for OPS are illustrated. The chapter concludes with the presentation of a taxonomy to support the choice of the OPS.

This book chapter gave out explanation of ISO 14649 or STEP-NC and ISO 6983 or G&M Code. The structures of both standards were being explained and comparison between them were being made and studied into details through research done on both codes representation. Summary of the comparison were being groups into specific categories that gave out details view on how ISO 14649 are better equipped as compared to ISO 6983. The comparison made was on the general main categorization of the differences rather than focusing on the difference in the details structure of the actual codes and was based on the intention of highlighting the benefits of ISO 14649 instead of degrading ISO 6983. In general, both codes have its own advantages but as we move towards the future, requirements and advancement for manufacturing sectors evolved with time and its vital for industries to adapt to these changes to provide better end products, and via this one to one comparison, the strength of STEP-NC or ISO 14649 can be further highlighted.

A parallel manipulator is a closed-loop mechanism in which the end-effector is connected to the base by at least two independent kinematic loops. A general description of these types of manipulators is explained with examples and applications. With multiple closed loops, stiffness of the manipulator is typically improved because the multiple leg connectors sustain the payload in a distributive manner. Off-late the re-configurability of the platforms gain more research interest among researchers for its increasing practical applications in industries. The commercial hexapods that are available in the market are mission specific with no choice offered between structural rigidity and dexterity to use the same platform for other applications.

In this chapter, an effort is made to characterize the parameters for developing a reconfigurable Stewart platform for contour generation and vibration isolation applications. The limited treatment of the platform characteristics leads to the lack of an efficient methodology for determining the optimum geometry for this task. A solution is provided through the formulation of dimensionless parameters in combination with a study on the generic parameters like configuration. The variable geometry approach for the reconfiguration of Stewart platforms is adopted in detail for four different platforms, and a generic approach is formulated after studying different parameters.

A stiffness model developed for contour generation application is used in tandem with this generic approach to identify the trajectory with maximum stiffness for complex contours. An extensive study on the effect of the identified parameters on the performance and characteristics of Stewart platform for both the applications are performed. Simulations, in order to study different contours are performed to obtain the trajectory with maximum stiffness. The configuration best suited for contour generation also is identified and the data set required to move the tool for a specific trajectory is also identified. The effect of the identified dimensionless parameter on the system performance is also studied. The parameters are tested for vibration isolation application also and the results are used in designing the test rig.

The Stewart platform test rig developed is fed with the dataset obtained for different trajectories and error analysis is performed to validate the simulation results. An algorithm is developed on the basis of kinematic path control for conducting the experiments to find the tracking performance. The results are used to establish the importance of dimensionless parameters for reconfiguration of Stewart platform. It is proposed that this methodology could be adopted for any application to develop a complete set of design tool for any new reconfigurable Stewart platform. Experimentations to identify the natural frequency of the developed Stewart platform were performed to ascertain the frequency used for simulation studies. A novel concept of Multilevel reconfigurable Stewart platform is introduced to overcome difficulties and also for effective performance in both the applications.

An essential part of a Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) is selfreconfigurable machines. These machines are based on self-reconfigurable mechanisms that can reshape their structures according to the desired changes. The selfreconfigurable mechanisms can be developed using the reconfigurable modeling theory [10]. This theory is used for development of reconfigurable control systems that intelligently unify reconfiguration and manage the interaction of individual machine control systems within the RMS.

In this paper, an example of 2-DOF Global Kinematic Model (2-GKM) generation and a solution is presented to demonstrate the methodology and application of the reconfigurable modeling theory. The model has combinations of either rotational and/or translational types of joints and all possible positive joint directions in 3D, which is unified using predefined reconfigurable parameters. The reconfigurable parameters are used to control the joint’s positive directions and its type (rotational and/or translational). For the symbolic calculation of the 2-GKM dynamic equations, the recursive Newton-Euler algorithm is employed using the symbolic algebra package MAPLE 12. The dynamic model is named Global Dynamic Model (2-GDM). The significance of the 2-GDM is that it automatically generates each element of the inertia matrix A, Coriolis torque matrix B, centrifugal torque matrix C, and the gravity torque vector G, using Automatic Separation Method (ASM). Instead of solving the dynamics of different kinematic structures for the 2DOF machines, the 2-GDM can be used to auto-generate the solution by only defining the reconfigurable parameters. Using 2- GDM equations, a simple example of Ttr (Translation and translational/rotational) structure was used to demonstrate the model capability. Its kinematic, dynamic and control platform solutions are generated using previously defined reconfigurable parameters. The results proved the model’s validity.

This work is focused on a conceptual framework that is able to provide cognitive capabilities to an assembly environment. The framework provides assembly decision-making processes that consider assembly resources and design of a product. The proposed cognitive assembly system comprises of knowledge databases, assembly sequence generation, assembly resource planning and autonomous (self-learning) control capabilities.

This research presents the kinematics analysis and the teleoperation system of a 4-DOF modular reconfigurable robot. The forward kinematic analysis of the designed robot is conducted firstly. A numerical method with the backpropagation neural network is investigated to solve inverse kinematics problem and the training samples for the neural network are obtained with FARO laser tracker, which guarantees modeling accuracy of the non-linear mapping from the task space to the joint space. The remote control system has a client-server structure. The local robot control computer plays a role as a server and remote terminal as a client. Simulation, monitoring and control of the robot can be conducted in a remote manner. When client works in the simulation mode, users can simulate robot motion with the virtual one. While the system works in the monitoring/control regime, the robot can be remotely controlled and the status of robot can be monitored dynamically at client site. By using Java3D technique, virtual model of the robot is implemented and only small data parcels with the current robot coordinates need to be transmitted to the visualization module of client side. This accelerates the system response and provides the operator with a synthesized view of the real robot.