Modeling and optimization of implementation aspects in industrial robot coordination
Journal article, 2021

Cycle time for an assembly line in the automotive industry is a crucial requirement for the overall production rate and business achievements. In a multi-robot station, besides workload distribution, operations sequencing, and robot motions, an important issue is robot coordination. A key aspect, so far neglected, is the robot motion delay due to the implementation of robot coordination scheduling: our first contribution is to model these delays into a mathematical formulation in order to minimize their contribution to the overall cycle time. Two different setup scenarios, based on typical hardware setups, are modeled and optimized. The major contribution is an efficient heuristic algorithm to optimize our suggested model, which provides near optimal solutions in fraction of the time required by a general optimization package. We have also integrated such algorithm in a CAM software for robot offline simulation to be able to run industrial scenarios with real CAD models from the automotive industry. The results show that it is possible to reduce the delays due to the synchronization points and consequently cycle time, while still maintaining the pre-computed nominal time scheduling for robot coordination.

Greedy algorithm

Multi-robot coordination

Robot programs

Integer programming

Virtual manufacturing

Author

Domenico Spensieri

Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre

Edvin Åblad

Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre

Robert Bohlin

Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre

Johan Carlson

Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre

Rikard Söderberg

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science

Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing

0736-5845 (ISSN)

Vol. 69 102097

Smart Assembly 4.0

Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) (RIT15-0025), 2016-05-01 -- 2021-06-30.

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Production

Subject Categories

Robotics

Computer Science

DOI

10.1016/j.rcim.2020.102097

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 6