Semi-autonomous manufacturing systems: The role of the human-machine interface software and of the manufacturing tracking software

This technical paper discusses the advantages of implementing semi-autonomous manufacturing systems. The paper reports the development of two robotic cells designed with the objective of being almost autonomous, requiring only minor parameterization to operate efficiently. This objective can be obtained by proper design of the human-machine interface (HMI) software and of an efficient connection to the production tracking software. The two presented robotic systems explore these two aspects giving to the reader a good insight into the problem. The discussion will be kept general in a way to allow readers to easily explore from the ideas presented in the paper.