Software structure for a robot operated flexible manufacturing cell

Numerous advantages of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) result in their more common usage. Applications of FMS allows the high machining efficiency through high flexibility, which means the possibility to change the production to a different group of parts and to change the size of a production batch in a very short time. A number of problems in the production management, process control and jobs scheduling has to be solved for a proper operation of FMS. The paper presents the software and data organization for a flexible manufacturing cell model built at the Poznan University of Technology within the Inco-Copernicus project. In the described system the robot was applied for material handling tasks.