Mass Customization of Responsive Automated Assembly Cells

The automotive industry is distinguished by regionalization and mass customization of products. This necessitates increased product diversity and decreased lot sizes. Thus more product types have to be handled along the process chain and common production paradigms will fail. Hence, Rapid Manufacturing (RM) will be used for manufacturing small individual lot sizes. Nevertheless, new solutions for joining and assembling these components are needed. The state-of-the-art production control solutions at the robot cell level as well as the plant level have certain disadvantages, such as manufacturer dependent programming of industrial robots and difficulty in implementation of synchronized robot simulation and complicated robot program execution. Additionally, common human machine interfaces do not provide necessary functions to interact with the devices in the robot cell. The data trafficking between devices within a robot cell is very high because of the need to process raw data.A comprehensive and real time intelligent production control and monitoring system can overcome these limitations. It is a cluster of intelligent soft computing algorithms and smart intelligent peripheral devices. The concept proposed in this chapter is based on three interlinked main modules: a technology data catalogue (TDC), a Product Process Resource Module (PPR) and a central programmable automation controller (PAC) for real-time sensor/actor communication. The Technology Data Catalogue (TDC) retrieves, shares, processes and structures relevant engineering data. The automated scheduling processor creates an optimized and/or adaptable work plan based on feature technology. It has access to the TDC to extract information about the applicable technologies needed for manufacturing process and its operations such as material characteristics, measuring and monitoring conditions and their attributes. The processes are controlled by a Programmable Automation Controller (PAC) and Human Machine Interface Modules (HMI) for human interaction. The PAC and its supported software have widespread functionality especially for real time applications such as data logging and high frequency measurements and optimized control. Moreover, it provides homogeneous and standard interfaces to access heterogeneous devices in the system. Its compatibility and flexibility with the conventional programming languages has enabled in developing customized palette of functions and tools for scalable level of control solutions. Besides widespread accessibility, it can also influence the execution of robot program after pre-processing the data coming from various peripheral devices and calculating new robot paths by segmentation of detected curves and paths corresponding to the process planning information via one interface. The Human Machine Interface is developed using a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) in which different levels of user profiles with customized functionalities. The application software for the HMI portable devices will be based on graphical programming platform LabView and Microsoft.Net. The Human Machine Communication is based on the ontological based approach as a natural language interaction system for filtering and translating into machine command. This translated command is executed finally. The concept is in the process of demonstration in a laboratory set-up with distinct assembly and joining processes for experimental validation in European research and development projects.