INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITION TO AUTOMATION AND ROBOTICS

By -

INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITION

Automation has many facets, both in the service industry and in manufacturing. In order to provide an in-depth treatment of the concepts and methods of automation, we have concentrated in this chapter on assembly and robotics. Industrially produced, finished products consist mainly of several individual parts manufactured, for the most part, at different times and in different places. Assembly tasks thus result from the requirement of putting together individual parts, dimensionless substances, and sub- assemblies into assemblies or final products of higher complexity in a given quantity or within a given unit of time. Assembly thus represents a cross-section of all the problems in the production engineering field, very different activities and assembly processes being performed in the individual branches of industry.

Assembly is ‘‘the process by which the various parts and subassemblies are brought together to form a complete assembly or product, using an assembly method either in a batch process or in a continuous process’’ (Turner 1993). VDI Guideline 2860 defines assembly as ‘‘the sum of all proc- esses needed to build together geometrically determined bodies. A dimensionless substance (e.g. slip materials and lubricants, adhesives, etc.) can be applied additionally.’’

The production system in a company can be divided into different subsystems. The assembly area is linked to the other subsystems by the material and information flow (see Figure 1).

Assembly is concerned with bringing together individual parts, components, or dimensionless substances into complex components or final products. DIN 8593 differentiates the following five main functional sections:

1. Supply

2. Adjustment

3. Inspection

4. Assembly work

5. Help functions

The composition of these activities varies greatly, depending on the industry and product. The structure of assembly systems is based on different organization types, depending on the batch size, the product, and the projected turnover. Assembly is divided into:

• Point assembly (often called site assembly)

• Workshop assembly

• Group assembly

• Line assembly

The evaluated scope for automation is expressed by this list in ascending order.

This chapter provides a general overview of the assembly field. Special emphasis is given to the selection and design of the appropriate assembly approach, assembly design, and assembly techniques.Automation and Robotics-0112

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DUALITY THEORY:THE ESSENCE OF DUALITY THEORY

By -
Image
THE ESSENCE OF DUALITY THEORY Given our standard form for the primal problem at the left (perhaps after conversion from another form), its dual problem has the form shown to the right. Thus, with the primal problem in maximizatio n form, the dual problem is in minimization form instead. Furthermore, the dual problem uses exactly the same pa r amete r s as the primal problem, but in different locations, as summarized below. 1. The coefficients in the objective function of the primal problem are the right-hand sides of the functional constraints in the dual problem. 2. The right-hand sides of the functional constraints in the primal problem are the coef- ficients in the objective function of the dual problem. 3. The coefficients of a variable in the functional constraints of the primal problem are the coefficients in a functional constraint of the dual problem. To highlight the comparison, now look at these same two problems in matrix notation (as introduced at the beginn...
Read more

NETWORK OPTIMIZATION MODELS:THE MINIMUM SPANNING TREE PROBLEM

By -
Image
THE MINIMUM SPANNING TREE PROBLEM The minimum spanning tree problem bears some similarities to the main version of the shortest-path problem presented in the preceding section. In both cases, an undi r ecte d and connected network is being considered, where the given information includes some mea- sure of the positive length (distance, cost, time, etc.) associated with each link. Both problems also involve choosing a set of links that have the shortest total length among all sets of links that satisfy a certain property. For the shortest-path problem, this property is that the chosen links must provide a path between the origin and the destination. For the minimum spanning tree problem, the required property is that the chosen links must provide a path between ea c h pair of nodes. The minimum spanning tree problem can be summarized as follows: 1. You are given the nodes of a network but not the links. Instead, you are given the po- tential links and the positive length for each ...
Read more

INTEGER PROGRAMMING:THE BRANCH-AND-CUT APPROACH TO SOLVING BIP PROBLEMS

By -
TH E BRANCH-AND-CUT APPROACH TO SOLVING BIP PROBLEMS Integer programming has been an especially exciting area of OR since the mid-1980s be- cause of the dramatic progress being made in its solution methodology. Background To place this progress into perspective, consider the historical background. One big break- through had come in the 1960s and early 1970s with the development and refinement of the branch-and-bound approach. But then the state of the art seemed to hit a plateau. Rel- atively small problems (well under 100 variables) could be solved very efficiently, but even a modest increase in problem size might cause an explosion in computation time be- yond feasible limits. Little progress was being made in overcoming this exponential growth in computation time as the problem size was increased. Many important problems arising in practice could not be solved. Then came the next breakthrough in the mid-1980s, with the introduction of the b r an c h- and-cu t approach to sol...
Read more