Robotic Assembly Planning and Control with Enhanced Adaptability

The dynamic market today requires manufacturing companies to possess high degree of adaptability and flexibility in order to deal with shop-floor uncertainties. Such uncertainties as missing tools, part shortage, job delay, rush-order and unavailability of resources, etc. happen more often in assembly operations. Targeting this problem, this research proposes a function block enabled approach to achieving adaptability and flexibility in assembly planning and control. In particular, this paper presents our latest development using a robotic mini assembly cell for testing and validation of a function block enabled system capable of assembly and robot trajectory planning and control. It is expected that a better adaptability can be achieved by this approach.