Handbook of Manufacturing, pp. 609-708 (2019) No AccessChapter 12: Manufacturing SystemsXun Xu, Lihui Wang, Jenny Xu, Xi Wang and Frederick M. ProctorXun XuDepartment of Mechanical Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand, Lihui WangDepartment of Production Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden, Jenny XuDepartment of Mechanical Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand, Xi WangDepartment of Production Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden and Frederick M. ProctorEngineering Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8230, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USAhttps://doi.org/10.1142/9789813271029_0012Cited by:0 PreviousNext AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsRecommend to Library ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Abstract: The following sections are included: System Design and Operation Sustainable Manufacturing Automation and Control Systems Information Systems Assembly Summary References FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Handbook of ManufacturingMetrics History PDF download

Development and testing of industrial robot environments is hampered by the limited availability of hardware resources. Simulations provide a more accessible and readily modifiable alternative to physical testing, but also require careful design to maximize their fidelity to the real system. In this paper, we describe new progress in building an entirely physics-driven simulation of the Agility Performance of Robotic Systems (APRS) Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). To maximize the accuracy of physics-based interactions in this environment, we develop several general-purpose improvements to the simulation of parallel grippers and multi-object collisions. We use pick-and-place tasks from the APRS Laboratory as well as generic benchmarks to verify the performance of our simulation. We demonstrate that our proposed improvements result in more physically-consistent simulations compared to standard implementations, regardless of the choice of physics engine or simulation parameters.

Measuring the agility performance of the industrial robots as they are performing in unstructured and dynamic environments is a thought-provoking research topic. This paper investigates the development of industrial robotic simulation algorithms for the effective application of robots in those changing environments. The distributed framework for this investigation is the Robot Operating System (ROS) which is extensively used in robotic applications. ROS-Industrial (ROS I), which extends the capabilities of ROS to manufacturing, allows us to interoperate between industrial robots, sensors, communication buses and other kinds of automation tools. Gazebo is used as the open-source 3D simulator to design a virtual industrial robotic system, which is a prevailing tool as a node in the ROS environment. An effort is underway to replicate the in-house experimental robotic kitting lab with a graphical physics simulation that can be shared worldwide. This graphical physics simulation is not tied to a specific robotic control system. An experimental approach will be presented detailing the issues related to a physics based simulation of kitting with multiple collaborative robots, multiple tools, parts, tool changers, safety system, and sensors. In this realm, the ability for the simulation environment to encompass the current system as well as additional more complex sensors and actuators will be discussed. To make this simulation environment more realistic, Gaussian noise will be introduced to the data generated by virtual sensors. We expect that this experimental approach will be a seamless way for users to verify and validate their control systems even if they do not have a physical robot at their facilities.

For the most part, robots perform best in highly structured environments, where objects are in well-known, predictable locations. Another way to describe this is that robots are not considered agile. But, in order for them to be useful to small manufacturers and to also allow larger manufacturers to offer more automated customization of high volume parts, they need to be. In this paper, we describe various technologies that are being developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in conjunction with outside organizations, such as IEEE, which can be used to enhance the agility of manufacturing robot systems. We validate these technologies using two industrially-relevant use cases. The first deals with task failure identification and recovery and the second deals with robot dynamic retasking. These use cases were successfully performed using a formal knowledge representation, a graph database, a perception system, a high-level and low-level planning system, as well as an overall architecture which brought all of the components together.

Industrial robots can perform motion with sub-millimeter repeatability when programmed using the teach-and-playback method. While effective, this method requires significant up-front time, tying up the robot and a person during the teaching phase. Off-line programming can be used to generate robot programs, but the accuracy of this method is poor unless supplemented with good calibration to remove systematic errors, feed-forward models to anticipate robot response to loads, and sensing to compensate for unmodeled errors. These increase the complexity and up-front cost of the system, but the payback in the reduction of recurring teach programming time can be worth the effort. This payback especially benefits small-batch, short-turnaround applications typical of small-to-medium enterprises, who need the agility afforded by off-line application development to be competitive against low-cost manual labor. To fully benefit from this agile application tasking model, a common representation of tasks should be used that is understood by all of the resources required for the job: robots, tooling, sensors, and people. This paper describes an information model, the Canonical Robot Command Language (CRCL), which provides a high-level description of robot tasks and associated control and status information.

Advances in sensing, modeling, and control have made it possible to increase the accuracy of robots, and enable them to perform in dynamic environments. Often, performance deficiencies are not evident until late in the development of the manufacturing process, which delays the beginning of production and may cause damage to parts that have already undergone costly manufacturing steps. The goal of this research is to determine if a robot can meet manufacturing requirements, how to optimally plan robot activities, and to monitor robot processes to track performance. To achieve this, representations of product and manufacturing information and robot capabilities should be carried through the design, process planning, production, and analysis phases. Standards for the exchange of this information have been developed, such as ISO 10303 Part 242 for semantic product and manufacturing information and device kinematics, and the Robot Operating System Industrial specification for robot modeling, path planning, and execution. This paper surveys the relevant technologies and standards needed to enable automated deployment of robots in new application areas.

End-to-end latency is critical to many distributed applications and services that are based on computer networks. There has been a dramatic push to adopt wireless networking technologies and protocols (such as WiFi, ZigBee, WirelessHART, Bluetooth, ISA100.11a, etc.) into time-critical applications. Examples of such applications include industrial automation, telecommunications, power utility, and financial services. While performance measurement of wired networks has been extensively studied, measuring and quantifying the performance of wireless networks face new challenges and demand different approaches and techniques. In this paper, we describe our work in progress of designing a measurement platform based on the technologies of software-defined radio (SDR) and IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) for evaluating the performance of wireless networks.

With the growth of robotic technology, there is a need for performance measures to characterize and compare robots and to help determine which features are most suited to a particular application.Robot systems are complex and involve a wide range of features and performance characteristics whose importance differs depending on the application domain.This paper describes a set of assembly performance measures associated with the different features along with an exploration of how one could represent this information.It organizes the assembly measures in reference to a taxonomy of assembly skills and tasks.Arranging the performance measures in this way will simplify the task of selecting a particular robot system for an assembly task by helping focus on those aspects of the task that are most critical.

Simulation is an indispensable part of design and analysis in a near infinite space of applications. Every day, simulation is applied to new problems as well as giving further insight into existing ones. Additionally, advancements in computing have enabled simulation to continue contributing understanding in areas where it is already a ubiquitous tool. Manufacturing in particular has benefited a great deal from simulation techniques ranging from Finite Element Analysis (FEA) for product design, to Discrete Event Simulations (DES) for process planning. In recent times emulation has emerged as an effective means of process validation. Emulation typically refers to a testing process where the controllers or control code are in their final state, while the components they control are still virtual. Virtual Fusion takes this one step further in creating a Hybrid Process Simulation (HPS), where any component of the process may be physically present or completely simulated. This paper first defines and then discusses the characteristics necessary for the component simulations needed in an HPS. It then follows with a technological survey, a literature review of existing tools, and concludes with research challenges.

In today’s manufacturing world, system integration often necessitates composing systems of technology that are not designed to interoperate with each other. This inherent incompatibility results in redundant, non–value added work that is required for information to be properly transferred and processed in order for the total system to function properly. As a result, current approaches to systems integration tend to be complicated, costly, time–consuming, and error–prone. In the automotive industry, this integration predicament is found most dramatically in vehicle assembly systems, which are built from a collection of different, incompatible, and multi–vendor “silo” subsystems. This paper will investigate the problems associated with integration of vehicle assembly systems and propose a standard information and communication model to address the integration problems due to incompatible data models. Benefits to the standard information and communication model, including better integration, improvements to the efficiency of the existing vehicle assembly operations, and additional capabilities to increase productivity, is discussed.

This report summarizes the presentations, discussions, and recommendations from the Model-Based Enterprise Summit held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in December of 2012.The purpose of the Summit was to identify challenges, research, implementation issues, and lessons learned in manufacturing and quality assurance where a digital three-dimensional (3D) model serves as the authoritative information source for all activities in a product's lifecycle.The report includes an overview of model-based engineering, technical challenges, summaries of the presentations given at the workshop, and conclusions that emerged from the presentations and discussions.

STEP-NC is a new data format for manufacturing control. One of its applications is to enable integrated on machine measurement of machining processes using vision systems and other sensors. In this paper we describe the manufacturing process and manufacturing resource models in STEP-NC that can be used to enable this type of measurement. These descriptions include the machine setup so that the configuration of the part can be identified and corrected, the machine kinematics so that the actions of a machine while adding or subtracting material can be verified, and the product tolerances so that the quality of the final part can be predicted and corrected during the machining.

Quality is a key element to success for any manufacturer, and the fundamental prerequisite for quality is measurement. In the discrete parts industry, quality is attained through inspection of parts but typically there is a long latency between machining, quality measurement and part/process assessment. Since manufacturing systems are by their nature imperfect, it is imperative to indentify and rectify out-of-tolerance processes as soon as possible. Rapid quality feedback into the factory operation is not a complex concept, however, the collection and dissemination of the necessary measurement data in a timely and tightly integrated manner is challenging. This paper discusses Web-enabled, real-time quality data based on the integration of MTConnect and quality measurement reporting data. MTConnect is an open factory communication standard that leverages the Internet and uses XML for data representation. The quality data is represented in MTConnect as XML to represent Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) output results. A pilot implementation to produce Web-enabled, real-time quality results in a standard MT-Connect XML representation from Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) inspections will be discussed.

Stacking boxes of various sizes and contents on pallets (i.e. making mixed pallets) is a primary method of preparing goods for shipment from a warehouse to a store or other distant site. Many billions of dollars are spent each year in preparing, shipping, and unloading mixed pallets. Designing the load on a pallet well can save money and effort in all three phases. But what is a good design? In this paper we discuss quantitative metrics for mixed pallets. We have built a graphical simulator called PalletViewer, also described here, that displays pallets being built and calculates metrics.

Manufacturing systems consist of many activities.Each of these activities may include one or more software and hardware systems.In order to make these software and hardware systems interoperable, the data exchange and sharing among them must be seamless.One of the key issues that impedes achieving manufacturing interoperability is how to standardize data sharing and exchange.An activity model for machining and measurement process planning was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to address the current information exchange situations and some of the barriers.This model represents functional activities in manufacturing systems with emphasis on process planning.Current standards and specifications for information exchange between different activities are identified.The purpose of this model is to provide a broad view for standard developers and industry experts to comprehend the common data flow between these activities and therefore to avoid multiple definitions for the same data.

Stacking boxes of various sizes and contents on pallets (i.e. making mixed pallets) is a primary method of preparing goods for shipment from a warehouse to a store or other distant site. A special session of the 2010 PerMIS workshop was held to examine mixed palletizing issues. Papers were presented by end-users, vendors, researchers, and evaluators of palletizing solutions. This paper presents a summary of this session and discusses issues ranging from how to construct pallet build plans to metrics for evaluating these plans to competitions that feature novel palletizing approaches.

Recently, MTConnect has been developed as an open and free communications standard to facilitate the exchange of data on the manufacturing floor for machine tools and related devices This paper will briefly describe MTC, and look at quality of service issues investigated by implementing a modest MTConnect testbed in a Dual-Ethernet machine tool network configuration MTConnect is expected to address the continuing pressure to reduce costs and improve time to market places in the CNC manufacturing world It can facilitate smarter ways of manufacturing and intensifies the need to integrate feedback from the shop floor into the enterprise business systems