Offline programming system for Isles of Automation - The flexible short series production platform

Abstract

Short series manufacturing forces production lines towards flexibility and reconfigurability with quickening pace. As many small- and medium enterprises wrestle to be profitable, the solutions are searched from modern manufacturing technologies like robotics. Currently, there are no commercially feasible OEM product packets available and therefore a lot of integration and development work is required before a production line is effective. To create such production lines in the future, this paper introduces a production platform concept ldquoIsles of Automationrdquo, which can provide the services that current systems are lacking. The Isles of Automation have a modular and layered structure, so the integration work will be easier and the robot cell will be as effective as it can be. To evaluate the concept, an example manufacturing process was selected and automated. The implementation mainly targeted the programming of the robot tasks, which is considered to be one of the main challenges with short series manufacturing robots.