Elements of agility in manufacturing

Smaller lot sizes, shorter times to market, and lower manufacturing costs are typical requirements of a modern manufacturing facility. Under such constraints, agile manufacturing systems are desirable. Elements of such a system include multiple robots, flexible parts feeders, modular conveyors, and machine vision. Flexible feeders enable a workcell to rapidly switch between different assemblies by eliminating the need for part-specific feed mechanisms. A flexible feeder, consisting of multiple conveyors to singulate parts, a vision system for pose determination, and a robot for part retrieval, was designed, implemented, and incorporated into an agile workcell. The system was shown to feed a wide variety of parts with little physical alteration at rates of up to 30 parts per minute. A new metric to describe feeder throughput was developed and a statistical analysis of feeder test results was conducted. In most assemblies there are operations which cannot easily be performed by a robo...