The linear motion command (G01) is a widely used command format in CNC machining. However, the tangential direction discontinuity at the corner junction will cause velocity fluctuations and excite the structural vibration of machine tools. Corner smoothing methods with controlled tolerance are used to obtain continuous smooth motion. Typically, most methods generate a symmetrical cornering trajectory

This research proposes a novel framework to control the stencil cleaning profile selection in the stencil printing process (SPP). The SPP is a major contributor to yield loss in surface mount technology (SMT). Enhancement in SPP performance is critical to improving the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly line. The selection of a solvent-based or a dry-based cleaning profile is challenging, but the

In this paper an overview of recent augmented reality (AR) solutions for manufacturing execution systems (MES) is presented. The first part of the paper describes the challenges of integrating AR into MES, while the second part focuses on custom AR solutions. The last part of the paper highlights the advantages of the proposed approaches, as well as real life experimental results. Experiments are described

Product variation and the unavailability of end-of-life product and condition information makes automation of disassembly a significant challenge. Several research attempts have been made employing different techniques to approach uncertainties in the disassembly process automatically, but it has made little influence on industrial applications. This research presents a robotic disassembly system aimed

In recent years carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) have gained enormous popularity in aircraft applications. Since the material is very expensive, costs have to be saved through an automated production. For the manufacturing of large structures it is often advisable to use cooperating robots. However, a major problem for the economic use of complex components is the programming of the robot paths

The optimization of the energy consumption of Industrial Robots (IRs) has been widely investigated. Unfortunately, on the field, the prediction and optimization strategies of IRs energy consumption still lack robustness and accuracy, due to the elevated number of parameters involved and their sensitivity to environmental working conditions. The purpose of this paper is to present, and share with the

Problems with robot dress packs are a major reason for on-line adjustments of robot programs and down-time in robot stations. It is therefore of high value if the physical behaviour of the dress packs can be considered with simulation methods already during the off-line programming process for a robot station. This paper presents a method for quasi-static path optimization for an industrial robot with

In-situ aeroengine maintenance works are highly beneficial as it can significantly reduce the current maintenance cycle which is extensive and costly due to the disassembly requirement of engines from aircraft. However, navigating in/out via inspection ports and performing multi-axis movements with end-effectors in constrained environments (e.g. combustion chamber) is fairly challenging. A novel extra-slender

The non-uniform rational B-spine (NURBS) curve interpolation is a key technology of the advanced computer numerical control (CNC) system. NURBS curve interpolation can realize a high-speed and high-precision machining, and it can also avoid some inevitable deficiencies of the linear and circular interpolation functions which are generally used in traditional NC system. Before the interpolation, some

Three-dimensional (3D) printers are widely used in rapid prototyping and mass customization. However, capacity planning for 3D printers is challenging because 3D printers are usually not dedicated, and estimating the demand for their capacity is not easy. To overcome this problem, in this study, a consistent-decomposition (CD) fuzzy-analytic-hierarchy-process (FAHP) approach is proposed. This approach

A key challenge in human-robot shared workspace is defining the decision criterion to select the next task for a fluent, efficient and safe collaboration. While working with robots in an industrial environment, tasks may comply with precedence constraints to be executed. A typical example of precedence constraint in industry occurs at an assembly station when the human cannot perform a task before

Robots are increasingly present in our lives, sharing the workspace and tasks with human co-workers. However, existing interfaces for human-robot interaction / cooperation (HRI/C) have limited levels of intuitiveness to use and safety is a major concern when humans and robots share the same workspace. Many times, this is due to the lack of a reliable estimation of the human pose in space which is the

Robot safety standards defines Collaborative Operation as a state in which purposely designed robots work in direct cooperation with a human within a defined workspace. That is, an operator and an industrial robot complete assembly tasks at the collaborative workspace. A prerequisite to ensuring safety during all phases of operation is an understanding of the nature of hazards pertinent to collaborative

Vibration suppression is a major difficulty in the grinding of low-stiffness large thin-wall shells. The paper proposes that effective workpiece vibration control can be performed by a novel force-controlled end-effector integrated into a robotic grinding workcell. First, a dynamics model is built to capture the characteristics and vibration suppression mechanism of force control-based robotic grinding

A cyber-physical system is one of the integral parts of the development endeavor of the smart manufacturing domain and the Industry 4.0 wave. With the advances in data analytics, smart manufacturing is gradually transforming the global manufacturing landscape. In the Resistance Spot Welding (RSW) domain, the focus has been more on the physical systems, compared to the virtual systems. The cyber-physical

The manufacturing industry is facing the impact of a dynamic market and intensive competition. Many companies are looking for a new approach to improve their business activities in a collaborative business ecosystem with other stakeholders. Cloud computing enables the sharing of manufacturing resources and capabilities between different stakeholders to support business and physical production. The

A control system based on multiple sensors is proposed for the safe collaboration of a robot with a human. New constrained and contactless human-robot coordinated motion tasks are defined to control the robot end-effector so as to maintain a desired relative position to the human head while pointing at it. Simultaneously, the robot avoids any collision with the operator and with nearby static or dynamic

Grinding marks and traces, as well as the over- and under-cutting phenomenon are the severe challenges in robotic abrasive belt grinding of turbine blades and it greatly limits the further application of robotic machining technology in the thin-walled blade fields. In the paper, an active force control method consisting of force/positon and PI/PD controller based on six-dimensional force/torque sensor

In this research, we propose a system architecture of the server-edge dualized closed-loop data analytics system for cyber-physical system (CPS) application. We define six essential components for the data analytics system for CPS application: (1) the cyber model, (2) the data analytics module, (3) the data analysis model execution module, (4) the decision making module, (5) the system control module

Unpredictable and time-variable adhesion force between the rubber unstacking robot and the rubber block is generated, which makes it difficult for the robot to smoothly complete the rubber disassembly task, thereby bringing about new robot control problems. For solving the above problems, a novel method of inner/outer loop impedance control based on natural gradient actor-critic (NAC) reinforcement

Despite the advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence, there are many tooling tasks with cognitive aspects that are rather challenging for robots to handle in full autonomy, thus still requiring a certain degree of interaction with a human operator. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for both planning and execution of robot-surface contact tasks whereby interaction

In this paper a novel approach for sustainable 3D printing with a Linear Delta Robot equipped with elastic elements is presented and experimentally validated. Energy saving is achieved thanks to the introduction and optimization of linear springs that are mounted on the robot with different configurations: in parallel to the prismatic joints, or directly connecting the end-effector to the fixed frame

Tight position tolerance is required for fastener holes in wing manufacturing. Automated drilling system with high positioning accuracy is the key to achieve the requirement. The paper seeks to determine allowable values of variation sources and guarantee the hole position tolerance. The process of reference hole positioning and the compensation of drilling positions are firstly explored and formalized

Overview of current manufacturing enterprises show that successful global manufacturing enterprise has great collaboration among designer, manufacturer, and customer, which effect on reducing production life cycle and improving customer satisfaction. Recently, several past and ongoing research projects have conducted to enable the collaborative platform to develop effective collaboration with the manufacturing

Optimizing the energy consumption of robot movements becomes one of the increasingly important issues in industry. Minimizing a robot's movement has been identified as one of the strategies to improve energy efficiency in robotic systems. In this paper, a mathematical model of the total energy consumption of cycle pick-and-place tasks is proposed, which considers operating motion and homing motion

Digital twin is a virtual model that represents physical entities in a digital manner. By leveraging means of data to simulate the behavior of physical entities in the real environment, the functions of physical entities can be optimized and expanded, through virtual and real interaction feedback, data fusion, decision making, and optimization. Despite numerous researches on digital twin concept and

This paper reports about the design of a bio-inspired compliant wrist, whose mobility (i.e. ulnar-radial deviation and flexion-extension) has been realized by employing two pairs of contact-aided Cross-Axis Flexural Pivots (CAFPs), actuated via remotely-placed servo-motors and tendon transmissions. The human wrist behaves differently when deflecting in clockwise or anticlockwise direction, both in

In this manuscript we report on a vision-based data-driven methodology for industrial robot health assessment. We provide an experimental evidence of the usefulness of our methodology on a system comprised of a 6-axis industrial robot, two monocular cameras and five binary squared fiducial markers. The fiducial marker system permits to accurately track the deviation of the end-effector along a fixed

Several approaches with interesting results have been proposed over the years for robot grasp planning. However, the industry suffers from the lack of an intuitive and reliable system able to automatically estimate grasp poses while also allowing the integration of grasp information from the accumulated knowledge of the end user. In the presented paper it is proposed a non-object-agnostic grasping

In the field of human-robot collaboration (HRC), the speed and separation monitoring (SSM) collaboration have attracted much attention owing to its non-contact safety strategy. 3D sensing applications are currently of interest for industrial automation technology and are considered to be a promising method for maximizing the efficiency of SSM. However, little attention has been given to the runaway

From the last decade, additive manufacturing (AM) has been evolving speedily and has revealed the great potential for energy-saving and cleaner environmental production due to a reduction in material and resource consumption and other tooling requirements. In this modern era, with the advancements in manufacturing technologies, academia and industry have been given more interest in smart manufacturing

With the development of computer and information technology, function modules of computer numerical control (CNC) systems are moving up to network environment to simplify local machine tool controller architecture and increase function reusability. In this context, network-based CNC system generates machine control instructions (MCI) in network environment and send MCI to local machines. Compared with

The quality requirements in clothing manufacturing have been increasing and consumer pressure on prices has also grown steadily. In fact, the textile industry is continuously seeking for countries practicing low salaries, because this kind of industry is usually based on labour-intensive tasks, to the detriment of task automation. Thus, clothing manufacturers need to be creative in order to improve

Hand layup is a commonly used process for making composite structures from several plies of carbon-fiber prepreg. The process involves multiple human operators manipulating and conforming layers of prepreg to a mold. The manual layup process is ergonomically challenging, tedious, and limits throughput. Moreover, different operators may perform the process differently, and hence introduce inconsistency

This paper presents an effective semi-analytical approach for predicting lower-order dynamics of a five degrees-of-freedom (DOF) hybrid robot named TriMule, which is composed of a 3-DOF parallel mechanism plus a 2-DOF A/C wrist. In this method, the governing equations of motion of limbs within the parallel mechanism are first formulated by finite element analysis (FEA) and then reduced to super-element

This paper investigates the problem of the variable stiffness for a class of multisegment continuum manipulators. A simple design that mainly consists of two types of pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs) is introduced to deal with the problem. To provide a detailed analysis, this characteristic of the variable stiffness is coupled with a mathematical analysis that is built upon the geometric mechanics

Extrusion-Based Additive Manufacturing is one of the most commonly used Additive Manufacturing techniques. However, the technique requires that the overhang features in a model should be provided with supports from below. The added supports contribute to a major source of material waste during the manufacturing process. In order to save support materials, considering 3D printing directions as a constraint

Collaborative robots (cobots) are robots that are designed to collaborate with humans in an open workspace. In contrast to industrial robots in an enclosed environment, cobots need additional mechanisms to assure humans’ safety in collaborations. It is especially true when a cobot is used in manufacturing environment; since the workload or moving mass is usually large enough to hurt human when a contact

Kinematics of flexible backbone continuum robots is highly non linear and its complexity quickly escalates with the number of sections of the robot, which is usually more than three. This paper introduces a kinematic modelling of actuation and configuration spaces that greatly simplifies the computational requirements compared to the commonly used Piecewise Constant Curvature Kinematics which results

An assembly interface of a large-scale aircraft component is a joint surface to connect adjacent large components. To guarantee the final assembly accuracy of the large components, the assembly interface is finish machined on site before the final assembly to cut the observed machining allowance. Thus, aiming at realizing the high efficiency and high quality in the finish machining operation, in this

A prototype of a rigid-flexible-soft hybrid finger mechanism with a standard force sensor is developed, and its kinematics and statics are studied systematically. First, its structure performances are analyzed, its equivalent mechanism is constructed and the degree of freedoms of the equivalent mechanism with constant or variable length of the flexible rod are analyzed. Second, the kinematics formulas

Using robots to assemble parts has always been a research hotspot, but the traditional analysis model of assembly mainly focuses on establishing the linear equation between the feedback force and the relative position of the peg and hole, which leads to high requirements for the material properties and geometric parameters of the assembly parts. In this paper, a new assembly strategy is proposed that

Human–robot collaboration is a main technology of Industry 4.0 and is currently changing the shop floor of manufacturing companies. Collaborative robots are innovative industrial technologies introduced to help operators to perform manual activities in so called cyber-physical production systems and combine human inimitable abilities with smart machines strengths. Occupational health and safety criteria

This article addresses a method for placement determination of robotic drilling system on two-dimensional manifold in robot joint space. It has been proved that the feasibility of positioning error compensation on two-dimensional manifold, and that the continuity of the robot parameters in the two-dimensional space is the prerequisite to perform the compensation in previous study. It appears that there

Recent advancements in human-robot collaboration have enabled human operators and robots to work together in a shared manufacturing environment. However, current distance-based collision-free human-robot collaboration system can only ensure human safety but not assembly efficiency. In this paper, the authors present a context awareness-based collision-free human-robot collaboration system that can

Toolpath smoothing is an important approach to improve robots’ operational stability and machining quality. Nowadays, the corner rounding smoothing and curve fitting smoothing algorithms are usually adopted to process the linear toolpath segments to improve its continuity. But the high order continuity between the fitted curve and its adjacent curves is difficult to be guaranteed. For parallel machining

Building time is an important issue in material extrusion-based additive manufacturing because in such a process head repositioning is always required between deposition segments (contours and rasters). The length of head repositioning, usually referred to as tool-path airtime or non-productive time, can be minimized by applying optimization algorithms. A particular issue in this area is the size of

Cloud manufacturing is a new manufacturing model that aims to provide on-demand manufacturing services to consumers over the Internet. Service composition is an essential issue as well as an important technique in cloud manufacturing (CMfg) that supports construction of larger-granularity, value-added services by combining a number of smaller-granularity services to satisfy consumers’ complex requirements

Large-scale components with complex curved surfaces are the foundation of aerospace, energy, and transportation fields, while full-field 3D measurements along with accuracy analyses are critical to control manufacturing quality. Most of the existing measurement methodologies rely on manual inspection, and the accuracy and efficiency are unsatisfactory. This paper introduces an integrated mobile robotic

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm aimed at connecting everyday objects to the internet. IoT applications include smart cities, healthcare, agriculture, as well as the industry and manufacturing. The ability to monitor and control the physical world using information technology creates many opportunities. However, it also comes with some costs. The exponential growth of connected devices, the

Robotic belt grinding of the leading and trailing edges of complex blades is considered to be a challenging task, since the microscopic material removal mechanism is complicated due to the flexible contact state accompanied with greatly varying curvature that finally affects the machined profile accuracy. The resulting poor accuracy of blade edges, to a great extent, is attributed to the trajectory

The automated robotic polishing system (ARPS) consisting of several robotic polishing cells (RPCs) is widely adopted in polishing industry to replace manual labor. Recently, energy-saving becomes a hotspot issue in manufacturing industry because of the increase in energy costs and requirement of environmental protection. Traditionally, robot motion planning and task scheduling are carried out separately

Nowadays, industrial robots have been widely applied for performing position-controlled tasks with minimum contact such as spot welding, spray painting, packing, and material handling; however, performing high-tolerance assembly tasks still poses a great challenge for robots because of various uncertainties of the parts to be assembled such as fixtures, end effector tools, or axes. From this perspective

Machinery fault diagnosis is of great significance to improve the reliability of smart manufacturing. Deep learning based fault diagnosis methods have achieved great success. However, the features extracted by different models may vary resulting in ambiguous representation of the data, and even wasted time with manually selecting the optimal hyperparameters. To solve the problems, this paper proposes

The manufacturing industry is seeing an increase in demand for more custom-made, low-volume production. This type of production is rarely automated and is to a large extent still performed manually. To keep up with the competition and market demands, manufacturers will have to undertake the effort to automate such manufacturing processes. However, automating low-volume production is no small feat as

Robotic grinding is considered as an alternative towards the efficient and intelligent machining of complex components by virtue of its flexibility, intelligence and cost efficiency, particularly in comparison with the current mainstream manufacturing modes. The advances in robotic grinding during the past one to two decades present two extremes: one aims to solve the problem of precision machining

Humans are favoured to conventional robotics for some tasks in industry due to their increased dexterity and fine motor skills, however, performance of these tasks can result in injury to the user at a cost to both the user and the employer. In this paper we describe a lightweight, upper-limb exosuit intended to assist the user during lifting tasks (up to 10kg) and while operating power tools, which

To guarantee the docking accuracy of large-scale components, their assembly interfaces usually need to be finished before the final assembly. However, there are some crucial problems affecting finishing efficiency and quality, e.g. use of hard-to-machine material at the assembly interface, manual interventions and process diversity in finish machining, difficulties in the alignment of the large component

Cloud manufacturing has been acknowledged as a transformative manufacturing paradigm aiming towards producing highly customized products via sharing distributed manufacturing resources and capabilities. One of the pivotal challenges regarding the practical realization of this idea is the process of matching manufacturing resources with personalized service demands. This problem contains two main steps:

Robots have become indispensable parts for the industrial automated workshop. The distance calculation between the industrial robot and obstacles is a fundamental problem for the robotic collision-free motion control. But existing methods for this problem have the disadvantage that the accuracy and execution efficiency cannot be guaranteed at the same time. In this paper, a pseudo-distance algorithm