Development of the instrumentation for a Flexible Manufacturing System prototype
Flexible Manufacturing System, Instrumentation; computer vision; inverse kinematics; manipulator.
The Industry 4.0 concept makes manufacturing a greater variety of products feasible due to the integration of traditional processes and information technologies. This concept obviously can be applied to Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS), which are automated assemblies to set several machine tools, typically controlled by numerical controls (CNC's), and interconnected by a transportation, handling and storage system. A centralized decision-making system is responsible for controlling this grouping. The transducers present in the FMS aides to control and monitor production processes in real-time. This study aims to develop an FMS prototype composed of a conveyor belt and a robotic manipulator with 6 degrees of freedom, instrumented with transducers for locating and recognizing objects and supported by a computer vision system. Thus, the described system was instrumented with an ultrasonic transducer and cameras associated with a MyRIO 1900 microcontroller. LabVIEW® software allowed the implementation of inverse kinematics routines, based on the algebraic method, to manipulate objects between the conveyor belt and points of interest. Computer vision routines were developed to recognize color, flat shape and read QR Codes associated with objects on the conveyor belt. Therefore, a system based on a conveyor belt, camera, ultrasonic transducer, and a manipulator allowed simulating the activities of an FMS with the identification and movement of objects. Manipulator control uses algorithms based on the concept of inverse kinematics. The computer vision routines developed were capable of recognizing color, flat shapes and recognizing information present in QR Codes associated with objects.