Design and implementation of an intelligent remote centre compliance (IRCC) for state of the art process control and self optimisation

An intelligent remote centre compliance (IRCC), has been built to develop a self-teaching robot that is capable of managing and improving the efficiency of assembly operations. Robots are now commonplace in the modern manufacturing environment, but need to be used to their full capacity in order to be made cost effective. The proposed IRCC is a design tool that analyses operations being performed, using simple industrial electronics, and develops a kinematic model of the process based on this information. This model is used to generate new control routines and reduce the complexity of the required task. The IRCC system is also used to design a 'task optimised compliance', specifically designed to further maximise the efficiency of a particular task. By introducing this self-awareness it is possible to upgrade a simple robot to a state of the art learning machine. This paper details the design of such an IRCC system.