Event-Driven Interoperable Manufacturing Ecosystem for Energy Consumption Monitoring

Industrial environments are heterogeneous systems that create challenges of interoperability limiting the development of systems capable of working collaboratively from the point of view of machines and software. Additionally, environmental issues related to manufacturing systems have emerged during the last decades, related to sustainability problems faced in the world. Thus, the proposed work aims to present an interoperable solution based on events to reduce the complexity of integration, while creating energetic profiles for the machines to allow the optimization of their energy consumption. A publish/subscribe-based architecture is proposed, where the instantiation is based on Apache Kafka. The proposed solution was implemented in two robotic cells in the automotive industry, constituted by different hardware, which allowed testing the integration of different components. The energy consumption data was then sent to a Postgres database where a graphical interface allowed the operator to monitor the performance of each cell regarding energy consumption. The results are promising due to the system’s ability to integrate tools from different vendors and different technologies. Furthermore, it allows the possibility to use these developments to deliver more sustainable systems using more advanced solutions, such as production scheduling, to reduce energy consumption.

MANUFACTURING PROCESSES TRANSFORMATION IN AERONAUTICAL SECTOR IN AN INDUSTRY 4.0 CONTEXT

Adoption by the aeronautical sector of developments and technologies of the so-called Industry 4.0 is a major transformation, due to the added value that these new processes bring to the production chain. It is in this context, in which the relevance of the digitalization and automation of all manufacturing processes is observed, with the increasingly widespread implantation of robotic cells and other technologies such as systems of vision and artificial intelligence, will lead to a new digital scenario that will allow the creation in real time of reconfigurable and sustainable spaces with high productivity and reliability.

Modeling and Simulation of the Robotic Layup of Fibrous Preforms for Liquid Composite Molding

In recent years, the concepts of industry 4.0 are widely spreading in many different sectors, from agriculture to home automation, from transportation systems to manufacturing processes. One of the pillars of this concept is related to the use of robotic cells. The focus of the present work is the robotic automated layup of dry fibrous preforms to be employed in liquid composite molding (LCM) processes. In particular, the article describes a software tool developed to simulate the automated placement and layup of fiber fabrics and tissues on complex shape molds by means of a robotic system. The tool has been coded in Matlab language. An end-effector has been appositely designed for the fiber layup and it has been included in the model. The simulation provides as output the path generation and the configuration of the robotic arm and of end effector along the entire layup process. The implemented code has been compared with the commercial software RoboDK.

Flexible Produktionsysteme/Agile Battery Cell Manufacturing as Response for Volatile Markets and Technologies

Die industrielle Batteriezellfertigung ist geprägt durch starre Produktionssysteme für die Massenfertigung. Die Fertigung anwendungsspezifischer Zellen im geringen bis mittleren Stückzahlsegment erfolgt derzeit kostenintensiv in einer Werkstattfertigung. Basierend auf standardisierten Roboterzellen und einer flexiblen Steuerungsarchitektur wird ein Konzept zur hoch automatisierten material-, format- und stückzahlflexiblen Batteriezellfertigung beschrieben.   Industrial battery cell production is characterized by rigid production systems for mass production. The production of application-specific cells in a low to medium quantity segment is currently performed by cost-intensive workshop production. Based on standardized robotic cells and a flexible control architecture, a concept for highly automated battery cell production that is flexible in terms of material, format and number of units is described.

Investigation of object manipulation positioning accuracy by bernoulli gripping devices in robotic cells

Ensuring the necessary accuracy of positioning the objects of manipulation of Bernoulli's grippers in robotic cells is an urgent task and can be achieved by choosing rational parameters of the gripping process. The article conducts experimental studies of the process of handling by Bernoulli grippers of objects of manipulation at different operating parameters and their weight. For this purpose, an experimental setup was developed, which consists of an industrial robot IRB 4600, an IRC5 controller, a Raspberry Pi microcontroller and two clock-type micrometers. The method of determining the total positioning error of the "robot-gripper-object" system is presented, which takes into account the positioning errors of the industrial robot, the errors of the gripping device and the errors of basing the object of manipulation relative to the axis of symmetry of the gripping device. The ABB IRB 1600 industrial robot was programmed in the ABB RobotStudio environment to cyclically simulate the handling operation and to determine the deviation of the position of the manipulation object after its gripping from different distances. The first cycle of automatic mode was used to calibrate the micrometer indicators, while gripping the object was carried out from a distance of 0.02 mm. For better reliability of research results, 20 measurement cycles were performed for each of the variable parameters. As a result, it was found that the maximum base error of objects does not exceed 0.4 mm. When capturing objects from a distance of 0.5…1 mm, the mean value of the base error will be 0.08…0.15 mm, with a standard deviation of 0.025…0.035 mm. The paper studies the effect of the displacement Δ of the center of mass of the gripped object relative to the axis of the Bernoulli gripper on the accuracy of the base of the objects. It is established that when the center of mass of the gripped objects is shifted relative to the Bernoulli gripper axis up to 20 mm, the maximum base error of the objects increases 2.2 times.