The integration of equipment and other devices built into industrial robot cells with modern Ethernet interface technologies and low-cost mass produced devices (such as vision systems, laser scanners, force torque-sensors, PLCs and PDAs etc.) enables integrators to offer more powerful and smarter solutions. Nevertheless, the programming of all these devices efficiently requires very specific knowledge about them, such as their hardware architectures and specific programming languages as well as details about the system's low level communication protocols.To address these issues, this paper describes and analyses the Plug-and-Play architecture. This is one of the most interesting service-oriented architectures (SOAs) available, which exhibits characteristics that are well adapted to industrial robotics cells. To validate their programming features and applicability, a test bed was specially designed. This provides a new graphical service orchestration which was implemented using Workflow Foundation 4 of .NET. The obtained results allowed us to verify that the use of integration schemes based on SOAs reduces the system integration time and is better adapted to industrial robotic cell system integrators.
Nowadays, it is not uncommon to find news and research about robotic machining applications, as milling and drilling. The flexibility, programmability and low price of robots, conversely to CNC machines, makes robotic machining an interesting opportunity for manufacturing of large parts. In this paper, the authors show the current advances on developments of robotic machining and a theoretical framework of the process, evidencing its weaknesses and strengths. Since the low stiffness of robots is their main disadvantage, the target of researchers is to improve this characteristic, and therefore avoid adverse effects like vibration, which influences the machining accuracy. The last developments can be categorized according to their research field: modelling and control of the process, robot workspace optimization, redundancy analysis, vibrating/chatter analysis and new designs and methodologies for the improvement of machining. These researches increase the efficiency and accuracy of the process with the goal to convert robots in a real alternative to CNC machines. In fact, the authors are working on the aim of proposing a characterization of several machining operations with robots, considering a force/torque control that provide the system a feedback with the improved stiffness matrix to correct errors and improve the accuracy during machining.
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