Current State Model for Easy Reconfiguration of Robot Systems and Offline-Programming-Environments

Fast changing products and processes, accelerated technological development and customised products lead to small lot sizes. This change in production results in the increasing demand for flexible and changeable production and robot systems and thus in reconfiguration efforts. Today, the fast and economic reconfiguration of robot systems states a big challenge. Common reconfiguration processes are characterized by heterogeneous peripheral devices, different programming environments and the need for expert knowledge, thus leading to long commissioning times. In this paper, the dataflow of configuration and reconfiguration processes are analysed at the example of two use cases. On this basis, a classification of the information flow is generated and requirements for automatic reconfigurable systems are derived. Subsequently, a new approach for the easy reconfiguration of robot systems and programming environments is presented. The approach uses a state-model that represents a digital image of the current configuration of the robot system. Combining the aspects of the structure of peripheral components, the information retrieval, the state-model itself and the configuration derivation, a new reconfiguration procedure for industrial robot systems is described.