Description:

In manufacturing industry, production batches are decreasing, resulting in an increase in required changeovers. Companies are required to respond quickly and cost-efficiently to the changing market. One way for the Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to become more agile, is to have an agile, modular and reconfigurable manufacturing infrastructure with intelligence embedded in the manufacturing facilities.

This project aims to develop a smart facotory with distributed intelligence, represented as a manufacturing cell in the LISMS. The manufacturing cell consists of a CNC lathe, conveyors and two industrial robots, KR-10 and KR-16, and an inspection/assembly workstation. We will use decentralized control supported by distributed intelligence, linking the system through an extensible, flexible, and fault-tolerant communication architecture. Extensive use of Industry 4.0 technologies is anticipated, e.g. Digital Twins, machine vision, and wireless communications. Also considered is the key protocol is OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) - a de facto machine to machine communication protocol for Industry 4.0.

Type:

Undergraduate

Outcome:

A functional manufacturing cell consisting of a CNC machine tool, robot and conveyor and utilising OPC UA, Digital Twin concepts and machine vision technologies, that

• has an easy-to-extend, modular architecture to be able to
• incorporate additional manufacturing facilities, e.g. mobile robots, and
• dynamically reconfigure the cell in an event of equipment break-down or unavailable, or equipment addition.
• has the ability to track and trace in-progress products
• can carry out tasks such as tracking a part on a conveyor, picking it up, loading it onto the machine tool and unloading it once machining is completed
• integrate the CNC lathe with the system to realise more advanced functions, e.g. identifying and executing a machining programme
• has some level of scheduling capabilities dealing with multiple products
• has a user-friendly Human-Man-Interface (HMI).

Prerequisites

Some manufacturing experience and strong IT and electronic background. 

Specialisations

• Mechanical Engineering
• Mechatronics Engineering

Categories

• Industry 4.0 Smart Manufacturing Systems

Supervisor

• Xun Xu

Team

• Nico Holmes
• Luka Katavich

Lab

Manufacturing Systems (405.870, Lab)