Study on ubiquitous robotic systems for smart manufacturing program

Abstract

The smart manufacturing program is gaining more and more research interests. To meet the requirements of increasingly low-volume, time-critical tasks, the traditional program-by-teaching methods should be replaced by more flexible and intelligent manufacturing processes. In this paper, we introduce the efforts of deploying ubiquitous robotic technology to the smart manufacturing program. Firstly, the various machinery processes are implemented as distributed components, which have standardized data ports and service ports. As a result, the machines could communicate and cooperate with each other. Further, a general-purpose task planner based on automated planning techniques is implemented to coordinate the machines for various tasks. We also use a test bed of smart assembly line to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Advances in planning technologies and cost reduction have brought the systems into the range of even small-to-medium enterprises.