"Sensors And Flexible Production"

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Abstract
While performance and working dexterity of simulation-systems and software-tools for computer aided manufacturing have lead to a rapid increase in the numbers of succesfull implementations, there is still a lack of knowledge concerning systematic approaches for development and use of complex, sensor-controlled equipment in flexible automation. This is because of two facts; on the one side sensor systems in the form of electro-optical devices and picture processing units as flexible solutions for industrial applications have extremly different capabilities and it is a hard task to decide what system to use under economic considerations and on the other hand we often find a rather simple straight forward approach for the sensor problem appearing in a specific production task. This usually leads to an one-pur-pose sensor system nonconformant with the flexible basis equipment, or even to a solution without any sensors but with additional non-flexible peripheral hardware. When few years ago electro-optical sensors were developed for assisting industrial robots in parts-handling, there were problems in justifying the overall enconomics of such systems. This has lead to them being used in Quality-control, where especially cost inten sive high-precision sensors were absolutely necessary. However during this period rapid progress has been made increasing the performance and reliability of such systems resulting in a migration back to the robotic field. Based on a few typical examples we will discuss various aspects of the implementation of sensor devices with varying decrees of complexity and costs, both in the fields of flexible production and quality control.

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