A new robotic assembly strategy and its implementation

Assembly is one of the key areas for achieving productivity improvements in industry. Robotic assembly has become a highly important aspect of robot industrial applications. The authors present an active/passive assembly system, which has the virtues of both active and passive assembly methods. Differing from the active/passive systems of the past, it combines the active and passive functions in one. Hence the system is fully controllable and can conduct assembly operation along any direction. The system is a macro/micro manipulation system. It employs a PUMA 562 robot as macro manipulator and a specially designed active/passive micromanipulator as the micro one which is mounted on the end of PUMA 562 robot. The whole system is controlled by an IBM-PC computer through C language and macro-instructions. An experiment shows that the system is effective