Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is a state-of-the-art manufacturing paradigm implementing the concept of service-oriented manufacturing. Machine tools are one kind of the critical manufacturing resources in Cloud Manufacturing, however machine tool matching is still immature owning to customization manufacturing service demands from users and various disturbing factors in production. This paper proposes

Grippers are widely used in Industrial Internet for facilitating various operations such as logistics, materials handling, assembly, etc. Current grippers are specifically designed for a specific application so that it is difficult to adapt to a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Soft grippers have been developed to grasp objects with high surface complexity in Industrial Internet. Some challenges such

Grasp detection based on deep learning is an important method for robots to accurately perceive unstructured environments. However, the deep learning method widely used in general object detection is not suitable for robotic grasp detection. Multi-stage network is often designed to meet the requirements of grasp posture, but they increase computation complexity. This paper proposes a single-stage robotic

Industrial robots are traditionally used at machining cells for machine feeding and workpiece handling. A reassignment of tasks to improve the productivity requires a modelling of the robot behaviour from the point of view of its position precision. This paper characterizes and predicts the precision achievable when drilling with an industrial robot in order to use it in machining operations. Robot

A time-optimal motion planning method for robotic machining of sculptured surfaces is reported in this paper. Compared with the general time-optimal robot motion planning, a surface machining process provides extra constraints such as tool-tip kinematic limits and complexity of the curved tool path that also need to be taken into account. In the proposed method, joint space and tool-tip kinematic constraints

In a cloud manufacturing system, manufacturing services form the service network and collaboration network. The performance of the networks can affect the cloud manufacturing system. Researchers can study the behavior of enterprises, service, resource and elements in cloud manufacturing through the simulation platform. In this paper, the service agent in the simulation platform can drive the manufacturing

Industry 4.0 describes a smart job shop as follows: it can meet individual customer requirements even if the requirements are changed at the last minute; its production control system (PCS) can rapidly respond to unexpected disruptions in production, and smart workpieces in the smart job shop can communicate with workstations to tell them what to do next. Present PCSs issue production instruction (PI)

Hybrid robots consist of both serial and parallel mechanisms, which have advantages in stiffness and workspace compared with serial/parallel robots when machining composite material. However, the forward and inverse kinematics of hybrid robots generally do not have analytic solutions. This paper deals with the analytic forward and inverse kinematics solutions of a 5-degree-of-freedom (DOF) hybrid robot

This paper proposes a 6R robot closed-loop kinematic calibration method to improve absolute position accuracy with point and distance constraints though machine vision. In the calibration process, a camera attached to the mounting plate of the robot is used to capture a fixed reference sphere as a point constraint and to record robot joint angles and gauge block lengths that are used as a distance

Robotic curved layer additive manufacturing (a.k.a. multi-axis 3D printing) has been gaining attention recently owing to its simplicity and unique ability of printing complex shapes without using a support structure. However, as the printing path now is no long planar and the nozzle orientation is no longer fixed but changes continuously during printing, even though it could be smooth when defined

In service-oriented manufacturing models, manufacturing resources in different enterprises are integrated and shared through network, cloud platforms, and logistics. On cloud manufacturing platforms, service providers offer on-demand manufacturing services to service demanders according to supply-demand matching results. As a special type of manufacturing services, logistics services provide transportation

This work focuses on additive manufacturing by Directed Energy Deposition (DED) using a 6-axis robot. The objective is to generate an optimized trajectory in the joint space, taking into account axis redundancy for parts of revolution produced with a coaxial deposition system. To achieve this goal, a new layer-by-layer method coupled with a trajectory constrained optimization is presented. The optimization

This paper presents a unified framework for computing a B-spline curve to approximate the micro-line toolpath within the desired fitting accuracy. First, a bi-chord error test extended from our previous work is proposed to select the dominant points that govern the overall shape of the micro-line toolpath. It fully considers the geometric characteristics of the micro-line toolpath, i.e., the curvature

Due to ever increasing precision and automation demands in robotic welding, the automatic and robust 3D seam extraction has become a research hot-spot of the welding robots. At present, most of the research work about seam extraction is aimed at butt joints. Nevertheless,too little work has been devoted to fillet joints and lap joints. Consequently,to achieve robust 3D seam extraction of different

During the robotic milling process, vibration is one of the main factors that affect the machining accuracy and surface quality due to the low stiffness of the robot structure. The robotic milling stability is a function of the frequency response function (FRF) at the tool tip, which is posture-dependent within the workspace. This paper introduces an approach for rapidly predicting the tool tip FRF

The increased complexity of modern production systems requires sophisticated system control approaches to maintain high levels of flexibility. Furthermore, the request for customized production with the introduction of heterogeneous production resources, increases the diversity of manufacturing systems making their reconfiguration complex and time consuming. In this paper, an end-to-end approach for

Over the past half-century, manufacturers have strived to achieve “Zero Inventory (ZI)” manufacturing, which puts the burden on suppliers to build their warehouses nearby production lines to meet the strict time delivery requirements of ZI production. Considerable improvements in manufacturing processes have been made. However, this practice in the meanwhile brings excessive warehousing operations

Cloud Manufacturing is a paradigm of intelligent manufacturing system with information opening, resource sharing, and diversified services. In order to research the issues in cloud manufacturing, such as behaviors of a service provider and service consumer, matching of service, dynamic change of resource, verification of business model, scheduling of service and evolution of service network, cloud

Nowadays, as an efficient and automatic welding machine that accepts and executes human instructions, welding robots are widely used in industry. However, the lack of intelligence in process planning makes welding preparation complex and time-consuming. In order to realize intelligent process planning of robotic welding, one of the key factors is designing a welding task data model that can support

Shared Manufacturing (SharedMfg), a Peer-to-Peer (P2P)-based resource sharing paradigm boosted by the wide-spread of sharing economy, servitization and Internet of things, tends to massively extend the scope of resource sharing in both vertical and horizontal directions, and as a consequence, it amplifies a credibility gap in the manufacturing area. To respond to this problem, and meanwhile, promoting

Selecting an appropriate additive manufacturing (AM) process or machine to fabricate an end-use product is an important issue in design for AM. One of many types of approaches for AM process selection is based on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). Most of the MCDM based approaches have an advantage in taking into account the relative importance of performance parameter types and a few of them also

At present, online lead-through and offline programming methods are widely used in programming of industrial robots. However, both methods have some drawbacks for unskilled shopworkers. This paper presents an Augmented Reality (AR)-based interactive robot teaching programming system, which virtually projected the robot onto the physical industrial environment. The unskilled shopworkers can use Handheld

In this study, an intelligent robotic precise assembly system for rapid teaching and admittance control was developed. The system comprised three parts, namely the teaching, trajectory learning, and controlling systems. The teaching system controlled the robotic arm through a haptic device and generated tactile feedback for the operator. The trajectory learning system optimized the reference trajectory

Hybrid serial-parallel kinematic machine tool (HSPKMT) has been regarded as a promising solution for 5-axis machining in many industrial fields. A typical HSPKMT can be constructed by integrating a parallel functional module with a serial functional module. Following this way, the authors construct a novel 5-axis HSPKMT through the integration of an over constrained redundantly actuated parallel module

Severe deformations and vibration usually occur when grinding the weak-stiffness workpieces, then fluctuate the grinding force and damage the surface. In this paper, the time-varying isobaric surface (TVIS) is defined as a virtual surface to generate constant force during robotic grinding. Based on it, a novel robotic grinding method, including contact trial and surface reconstruction, is proposed

A parameterized design of universal motion controller is proposed in discrete-time domain using composite nonlinear control approach for high-performance servo mechanisms in industrial automation. First, the model of servo mechanisms is converted into discrete-time state-space form, and a linear control law is designed, consisting of state feedback, reference feed-forward and disturbance compensation

Flexible conformal electronics can be applied in many novel fields, such as wearable sensors, curved display and epidermal electronics, owing to their good adaptability to curved surfaces. Currently, the manufacturability of flexible electronics has been greatly enhanced with the development of various printing technologies. In this paper, the active conformal deformation model and device are presented

Tool path smoothness is important to guarantee good dynamic and tracking performance of robot manipulators. An analytical C3 continuous tool path corner smoothing algorithm is proposed for robot manipulators with 6 rotational (6R) joints. The tool tip position is smoothed directly in the workpiece coordinate system (WCS). The tool orientation is smoothed after transferring the tool orientation matrix

It is widely acknowledged that machining precision and surface integrity are greatly affected by cutting tool conditions. In order to enable early cutting tool replacement and proactive actions, tool wear conditions should be estimated in advance and updated in real-time. In this work, an approach to in-process tool condition forecasting is proposed based on a deep learning method. A long short-term

Tool paths defined by G01/G02/G03 commands need to be smoothed to eliminate the discontinuities of velocity, acceleration and jerk at the junction points. Because of inherent problems of curve fillets, traditional corner smoothing strategies are limited to the smoothing of corners in plane. This article presents a method to smooth the space corners through blending the position, tangent, curvature

The new architecture for outdated robotic arm (ABB: IRB-1400) is developed by the direct variable-frequency drive (VFD) and considered as a class of unknown nonlinear discrete-time systems. The identification model is established by Multi-input fuzzy rules emulated network (MiFREN) with the online learning algorithm and the database of IF-THEN rules. The controller is designed by using the identification

Because of industrial robots’ relatively low stiffness, many research efforts have been performed to improve the robot stiffness by optimizing the robot posture. For freeform surfaces with large curvature, however, the expected high stiffness posture may undergo excessive changes that exceed the robot joint speed limit. Therefore, the stiffness optimization may not achieve the expected results in actual

In the Industry 4.0 scenario, collaborative robots have been strongly employed for complex processes and customized production activities. Interaction-based technologies have characterized this approach assisting the operator in several process workflows. In this paper, a haptic-based touch detection strategy is described and tested to assist, in real-time, the operator using a collaborative system

The rapid development new generation of information technologies facilitate the emergence of cyber-physical production system (CPPS) which could pave a way to exploring new smart manufacturing solutions. Digital twin (DT) is the technical core for establishing CPPS in the context of industry 4.0. Developing an easy-to-deploy and simple-to-use DT-based CPPS is a critical research gap. In this paper

Smart manufacturing, as an emerging manufacturing paradigm, leverages massive in-context data from manufacturing systems for intelligent decision makings. In such context, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) play a key role in digitizing manufacturing systems and integrating multiple systems together for collaborative works. Amongst different levels of smartness and connectedness of CPS, Digital Twin (DT)

We provide an overview and guidance for the Speed and Separation Monitoring methodology as presented in the International Organization of Standardization's technical specification 15066 on collaborative robot safety. Such functionality is provided by external, intelligent observer systems integrated into a robotic workcell. The SSM minimum protective distance function equation is discussed in detail

Over the past two decades, the bulk of gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopic procedures has shifted away from diagnostic and therapeutic interventions for symptomatic disease toward cancer prevention in asymptomatic patients. This shift has resulted largely from a decrease in the incidence of peptic ulcer disease in the era of antisecretory medications coupled with emerging evidence for the efficacy of