Rapid Hardware and Software Reconfiguration in a Robotic Workcell

In an increasingly competitive manufacturing industry it is becoming ever more important to rapidly react to changes in market demands. In order to satisfy these requirements, it is crucial that automated manufacturing processes are flexible and can be adapted to new production requirements quickly. In this paper we present a novel automatically reconfigurable robot workcell that addresses the issues of flexible manufacturing. The proposed workcell is reconfigurable in terms of hardware and software. The hardware elements of the workcell, both those selected off-the-shelf and those developed specifically for the system, allow for fast cell setup and reconfiguration, while the software aims to provide a modular, robot-independent, ROS-based programming environment. While the proposed workcell is being developed in such a way as to address the needs of production-oriented SMEs where batch sizes are relatively small, it will also be of interest to enterprises with larger production lines since it additionally targets high performance in terms of speed, interoperability of robotic elements, and ease of use.