روش شی گرا و توزیع برای برنامه نویسی سلول های تولید رباتیک

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are essential for small/medium batch and job shop manufacturing. These types of production systems are used to manufacture a considerable variety of products with medium/small production volumes. Therefore, the manufacturing platforms supporting these types of production must be flexible and organized in flexible manufacturing cells (FMC). Programming FMCs remains a difficult task and is an actual area of research and development. This paper reports an object-oriented approach developed for FMC programming. The work presented was first thought for application in industrial robot manipulators, and later extended to other FMC equipments just by putting the underlying ideas in a general framework. Initially, the motivation for this work was to develop means to add force control to a standard industrial robot manipulator. This problem requires remote access to the robot controller, remote programming and monitoring, as also is required to program and monitor any other FMC equipment. The proposed approach is distributed based on a client/server model and runs on Win32 platforms, i.e., Microsoft Windows and Windows NT. Implementation for the special case of industrial robot manipulators is presented, along with some application examples used for educational, research and industrial purposes.

Actual manufacturing systems are evolving rapidly to flexible systems. Hard Automation manufacturing systems, composed by highly productive and dedicated machines, are not suitable for today's manufacturing platforms. Today the enormous diversity of products along with the requirement for better quality at lower prices makes the product life cycle very short. This is incompatible with hard automation manufacturing systems.

In this paper, several aspects related to FMC programming were discussed. An object-oriented approach for FMC programming and monitoring was presented. This approach is based on an earlier effort carried out to add force control to a standard industrial robot manipulator, which is here extended to include other FMC equipments. Implementation of the proposed software architecture was presented for the special case of the robot we have at our laboratory (ABB IRB 1400). The developed solution includes robot communication and access software, sensor integration software and connectivity to Win32 applications software. Finally, application examples of the proposed software are briefly presented. The definition of general/complex set of functions for each FMC equipment and the definition of a calling messaging protocol to access these functions remotely, facilitate the programming task of FMC equipments by regular operators. A specialist is only needed to define those functions that are available as remote services, and only the operator should know how to call and parameterize them using simple commands