Simulation-based time and jerk optimisation for robotic press tending

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Increased production rate and robot motion smoothness in a sheet metal press line are essential. Smooth robot motions avoid unplanned production interruptions and excessive wear of the robots. Reaching high production rate and smooth motions requires tuning of the tending press robot control to minimise the cycle time and jerk. Doing this for a press line with multiple robots is a complex large-scale problem. To model such problems for the optimisation process, computer simulations become almost essential. This work presents simulation-based optimisation of the time and jerk of robotic press tending operations and investigates the importance of including the robot motion's smoothness. An optimiser works in concert with a simulation model of a sheet metal press line and its parametrised control system. The effect of including jerk minimisation in the objective function is tested on a real-world problem concerning a sheet metal press line. The results illustrate the importance of including jerk-minimisation as an objective in the optimisation. Furthermore, the performance of this approach is compared with manual tuning by experienced operators. The results show that the proposed simulation-based optimisation approach outperforms manual tuning.