Intelligent Control and Integration Software for Flexible Manufacturing Cells

Flexible manufacturing cells (FMC) are capable of producing a broad variety of products and changing their characteristics quickly and frequently. This flexibility provides for more efficient use of resources but makes the control of these systems more difficult. This paper presents several software applications developed for industrial robots and computer numerical control (CNC) machines. The objective of this software is to allow these equipments to be integrated, in an easy and efficient way, in modern FMC. For the industrial robots, we developed the "winRS232ROBOTcontrol" and "winEthernetROBOTcontrol" software. For the CNC machines, the software that was developed was "winMILLcontrol" for the mill and "winTURNcontrol" for the lathe. With this software, industrial robots and CNC machines can be integrated in modern FMC, in an easy and efficient way. An FMC was developed, with industrial characteristics, with the objective of showing the potentialities of the developed software. Thus, the proposed software in this paper was tested and validated in the developed FMC, and the experimental results show the viability and success of this software in the coordination of the different sectors in the FMC and in the improvement of their performance