Intelligent Buffer Storage System – Enabling Fast and Flexible Assembling with Industrial Robots

Production cells usually require a continuous supply of parts to be assembled. Elaborate feeding mechanisms or a system of prepared pallets on which the parts have exact positions are expensive and if a variation of the product is to be produced, the feeding mechanism or pallets must be modified. Such solutions do not provide sufficient flexibility and increase production costs. Today’s requirements for smaller series and customized orders have higher requirements on production cells. In this paper we show how flexible and adaptive production can be achieved, using methods and techniques from artificial intelligence by introducing an “autonomous” production cell, integrating and managing its own local buffer storage. The production cell is able to produce a number of variants of the product with no time delay between different configurations. The storage system, designated “Floating Storage”, handles the local buffer storage and guides the industrial robots to use available floor-space as storage. The system also orders parts from the main storage as the buffer storage approaches depletion. The parts arrive to the cell in standard containers and a commercially available vision system is used to locate the material. The prototype has been introduced in an assembly line at ABB.