Active Reconfiguration of Software and Hardware in a Robotic Workcell

High volume production has been a prerequisite in order to invest into automation of the manufacturing process for decades. The high cost of setup and the inflexibility of the solution meant low batch productions, often present in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), were dismissed for au tomation. In order to bring automation closer to SMEs a flexible solution is required that can accommodate more than one manufacturing process, allows rapid change between them and doesn’t require expertise knowledge for set up. In this paper we present a novel robotic workcell that enables active reconfiguration of software and hardware components, facilitating set up and production of several manufacturing processes on a single robotic cell. The ROS based software has been designed to be robot independent and modular. Special user interfaces have been developed for cell calibration, programming by demonstration and set up of quality control and part localization tasks. The proposed workcell is applicable in companies with product families, where manufacturing processes are similar and where fast changeover is required in order to adapt to new production requirements quickly. Due to the emphasis put on ease of use it will also be of interest to companies getting into automation for the first time.