Concept
This project is taken from our 6 person 3rd year master's group project which can be found here
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The project’s aim was to design an autonomous factory system to increase production by focusing on High Value Manufacturing (HVM) where small batches of varying products are manufactured instead of mass production. So, our developed system is highly customisable while trying to be as efficient as possible to achieve rapid production times. |
Concept |
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A web page enables users to place custom orders which are then stored on a server. This data is then passed onto our control node in the factory. When the product is ready to be manufactured, all the relevant information is written on the work-piece RFID tag. This is picked up by our autonomous motorised platform transport nodes. Under constant tracking and path planning from the vision system, the motorised platforms move the work-piece to the necessary processing nodes where the tooling, etc is carried out on the product. Once, the product is finished, it is dispatched to the customer with the information for delivery on the RFID tag. A ROS network is also used to send signals between the different nodes with the RFID tags ensuring “first-time right” products. |
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The proposed system is highly redundant and each node shall be shadowed by another one. Hence, any failure will not affect the production chain significantly. For example if one of the transport node fails, another transport node can pick up the task. To demonstrate our concept, we implemented a scale model system which consists of the following: |
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Demonstrator Video |