هدایت خودکار توسط استانداردسازی و مقیاس گذاری استراتژی تولید

Driving, an incremental forming method, can be carried out on driving machines. In a past project, this traditionally manual manufacturing method was automated through performing manual manipulations and manufacturing identical parts by robot handling. An advancement of this automation scheme is to define a set of standard sheet metal parts and derive a manufacturing strategy by combining tracked strategies for these standard parts. In this paper, we present a method to derive manufacturing strategies for geometric variations of standard sheet metal parts. In addition, a model describing the relation between geometric and process parameters is built to improve transformed manufacturing strategies.

In the field of sheet metal forming, there is a tendency towards reducing time cycles of production and at the same time achieving a high degree of customization as well as to an increasing number of prototypes. This requires a flexible and economic manufacturing method for individual part and small batch production.One option to achieve these objectives arises from the so called Amino-Method. Since the early 1980s many investigations have been made to modify and optimize this process and to identify limits and constraints on it [1], [2]. Even though much effort has been spent in order to decrease these limitations, still there are strong bounds on the process [3], [4].Within the framework of this paper we will focus on a more promising alternative to meet the requirements stated at the beginning: The driving process, an incremental forming method, which is carried out by a driving machine, the so called Kraftformer (Fig. 1 (a)).The machine employs universal tool sets that can be used to create almost any geometry for the sheet metal parts.The main tools used on the driving machine can perform stretching and shrinking in local forming areas of the metal part (Fig. 1 (b)). The final geometry is produced by this incremental forming method in a large number of steps. Even though this process is one of the oldest known incremental forming methods, systematic research investigations in this area have not started before 2001. Research effort has been put into studying and analyzing the driving process and clarifying the scope and spectrum of applications [6], [7], [8], [9].Driving is traditionally a manual manufacturing method. It needs to be automated to reduce the labour costs and to achieve cost-effective production. In [10], the automation scheme copied driving was introduced, in which an industrial robot was used to replace the manual manipulations. This automated driving process has two steps: The first step is to synchronously record the process parameters (stroke positions and forces) as a manufacturing strategy in the manual forming process by an optical tracking system; the second step is then to translate the manufacturing strategy for the interaction between the robot and the driving machine.Because of the manual tracking step, the method developed above is suitable for a small batch size but not for individual parts. In order to further increase the automation level or rather to reduce the manual work in that automation process, it is proposed to derive the manufacturing strategy for a new metal part from a database of standard manufacturing strategies.