Programmable Monitors and Wireless Sensors: Flexibility to Manufacturing Control

Tapio Heikkilä, Jukka Koskinen & Topi Pulkkinen

VTT, PO Box 1100, FIN 90571 Oulu, Finland

Email: Tapio.Heikkila<at>vtt.fi

Keywords: monitoring, assembly, wireless sensors, human robot cooperation

Flexibility requirements and challenges to improve ergonomics are leading to new ways to apply robot technologies in manufacturing. Human-robot interactive task execution lays basis to rationalise manufacturing operations and improve ergonomics and at the same time maintain production flexibility. Efficiency and safety can be supported by versatile sensors and setting the focus for sensing appropriately depending on the task stages related to the monitoring of task functions, safety or higher level production control functions. We present a programming and control architecture for integrating the sensor operations to manufacturing and robot control. The architecture is based on models for intelligent robot control and serves as a reference model to flexibly link the monitoring operations to control operations. We also describe an application, where a rear window of a car is assembled with deep interaction between a human operator and a robot. The monitoring operations are based on wireless sensor technologies.