Current status and advancement of cyber-physical systems in manufacturing

Establishing safe human–robot collaboration is an essential factor for improving efficiency and flexibility in today’s manufacturing environment. Targeting safety in human–robot collaboration, this paper reports a novel approach for effective online collision avoidance in an augmented environment, where virtual three-dimensional 3D models of robots and real images of human operators from depth cameras are used for monitoring and collision detection. A prototype system is developed and linked to industrial robot controllers for adaptive robot control, without the need of programming by the operators. The result of collision detection reveals four safety strategies: the system can alert an operator, stop a robot, move away the robot, or modify the robot’s trajectory away from an approaching operator. These strategies can be activated based on the operator’s existence and location with respect to the robot. The case study of the research further discusses the possibility of implementing the developed method in realistic applications, for example, collaboration between robots and humans in an assembly line.

Active collision avoidance for human–robot collaboration driven by vision sensors

Recent developments in wireless technologies have created opportunities for developing reconfigurable wireless manufacturing systems with real-time traceability, visibility and interoperability in shop-floor planning, execution and control. This paper proposes to use agent-based workflow management as a mechanism to facilitate interactions among RFID-enabled reconfigurable manufacturing resources. A production process is modelled as a workflow network. Its nodes correspond to the work (process), and its edges to flows of control and data. Nodes are represented as agents and edges as messages. As a sandwich layer, agents wrap manufacturing services around a work-cell and their operational logics/intelligence for cost-effectively collecting and processing real-time manufacturing data, forming so-called work-cell gateways. A reference framework for a shop-floor gateway is proposed based on the three key components: Workflow management, manufacturing services universal description, discovery and integration (namely MS-UDDI) and work-cell agents. Work-cell agents are packaged, registered and published at MS-UDDI as web services which are easily reused and reconfigured in the workflow for a specific production process. Finally, a prototype system is presented to demonstrate how the proposed method is used to define and execute a real-time reconfigurable manufacturing project.

Agent-based workflow management for RFID-enabled real-time reconfigurable manufacturing

In order to facilitate product realisation processes, presently, research is actively being carried out to develop methodologies and technologies to support geographically dispersed teams to organi...

State-of-the-art technologies and methodologies for collaborative product development systems

Conceptual design of remote monitoring and fault diagnosis systems

This paper presents a novel approach and a framework for web-based systems that can be used in distributed manufacturing environments. A prototype is developed to demonstrate its application to remote monitoring and control of a Tripod—one type of parallel kinematic machine. It utilizes the latest Java technologies (Java 3D and Java Servlets) as enabling technologies for system implementation. Instead of using a camera for monitoring, the Tripod is modeled using Java 3D with behavioral control nodes embedded. Once downloaded from its server, the 3D model behaves in the same way of its counterpart at client side. It remains alive by connecting with the Tripod through message passing, e.g., sensor signals and control commands transmissions. The goal of this research is to eliminate network traffic with Java 3D models, while still providing users with intuitive environments. In the near future, open-architecture devices will be web-ready having Java virtual machines embedded. This will make the approach more effective for web-based device monitoring and control.

Ryan Sams

Papers

Integrating Java 3D model and sensor data for remote monitoring and control