0000000000281484
AUTHOR
C. D'onofrio
An Agile methodology for Manufacturing Control Systems development
Robotized manufacturing cells are required more and more often to process high variety of short life-cycle product. This increases the need for methods and techniques for easy reconfiguration of software programs running in Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), i.e., devices able to control manufacturing systems. PLCs run embedded code characterized by a procedural nature that does not make it quite reconfigurable. In this paper we propose an AGIle COntrol System Development (AGICOSD) methodology that uses various practices of Agile software development methodologies and the Design By Contract (DBC) practice for modeling and programming manufacturing control systems. In this context we prop…
Integrating Manufacturing Equipments Using a Shop Floor Control System
A generic manufacturing system must interact with an environment characterized by a strong competition and by continuous technological changes. For this reason there is the necessity to make the system easily and economically modifiable in its hardware and software configuration. One of the main problems in making a manufacturing system re-configurable concerns its control system which has to be accordingly scalable and object oriented. This paper presents a methodology for making a manufacturing control system actually reconfigurable and adaptable to hardware changes in the manufacturing systems components. In particular, a PC-based shop-floor control system has been realized. Such system …
Off-line Programming and simulation for automatic robot control software generation
In this paper an off-line programming approach for welding robots is presented. The approach is based on the integration of a software tool for robot simulation and an user-friendly interface for automatic generation of the control program. The user can graphically arrange the components in a robotic work-cell and simulate the movements and operations of robotic arms before converting motions and operating sequences in controller-specific tasks. This methodology guarantees high level of flexibility of the robotic system when high variety of work-pieces needs to be welded. The approach has been implemented and tested in a real welding work-cell.
A user-friendly control system to easy reconfigure a manufacturing cell
Generic manufacturing enterprises need to interact with an environment characterized by a strong competition. In order to react to the mutable requests of market, control systems should confer to the manufacturing system capabilities for easy modifiability, and this can be achieved by reducing the necessary time to reconfigure the existing system. Following this main requirement, this paper presents a user-friendly control system that pursues three operational goals: - Ability to easy re-program the sequence of operations of the manufacturing equipments of a manufacturing cell; - Reconfigurability of the system, by allowing to add/remove a new/existing component in/from the manufacturing ce…
UML design and AWL programming for reconfigurable control software development of a robotic manipulator
The goal of the presented research is to face the topic of reconfigurable control software development in a concrete fashion, i.e., by presenting a control software system development approach which has been used for a specific, although easy to be generalized, robotized manufacturing cell component. In particular, a methodology for the control software development of a planar robot (2-degrees of freedom) is presented, from the conceptual design to the actual implementation. The methodology suggests UAL and object-oriented modeling and programming techniques for the design phase, while AWL programming language run by a PLC for the implementation phase. The analysis has been conducted consid…
Improving Of The Productivity And The Quality Of A Manufacturing Robotized Cell For Mig/Mag Welding
During the last years, globalization and the necessity to reduce production costs have pushed industry to employ more and more manufacturing robotized cells. This trend has been assimilated by arc welding too. The use of robotic systems allows to increase the performance of productive systems by means of reduction in lead-time, reproducibility of processes and increase in quality. However, process automation needs pre-scheduling of manufacturing cell movements and also a setup of different welding parameters, such as power provided by the welding generator, arc length and robot speed, all of which allows to get a joint without defects. An online scheduling of robotic systems brings certainl…