From CAD to Plug & Produce - A generic structure for the integration of standard industrial robots into agents

Abstract

Abstract Industries of low batches or one-off manufacturing aim for automation that is competitive enough to adapt to new or modified products daily through in-house knowledge. A knowledge that focuses on manufacturing processes, not on machine function programming. To solve this a complete set of actions that utilize seamless data transfer from product design to a Plug & Produce automation concept is proposed together with a generic structure for the integration of standard industrial robots into agents. This structure enables agents to handle their local reference coordinate systems and locations relative to a global perspective. Seamless utilization of data from product designs to Plug & Produce will simplify and shorten the time of digital development through concurrently usable text-based and graphical configuration tools of a configurable multi-agent system. Needed data extracts directly from the product design as requirements of operational goals. Extraction of data from the product design, sequence of goals, and process plans, which are recipes of how to solve goals, can by this concept be configured by in-house knowledge that has the process knowledge but not necessarily programming competence.