A robotic workstation -- part of the CAISR agile manufacturing workcell
Different groups have different ideas of what agile manufacturing is. For our purposes, we have adopted the following definition: Agile manufacturing is the ability to accomplish rapid changeover between the manufacture of different assemblies.
A testbed implementation of an agile manufacturing workcell has been developed at CAISR. This includes mechanical manipulators, flexible parts feeders, a vision system (cameras, frame grabber, and a library of image processing routines), as well as a limited number of dedicated sensors and actuators needed to complete a given assembly. The central feature of such a workcell is a controller capable of controlling each of the aforementioned components.