312 A Conceptual Design Environment for Robotic Cellular Production Systems

Robot assembly systems contain one or more flexible robots which can carry out a large number of operations, and can conduct flexible assemble processes. This paper proposes a conceptual design environment for such robot assembly systems. The proposed conceptual design environment composed of three key features, a simplified input device and a quantitative evaluation tools, and a visualization tool. Using miniaturized robot-type human interfaces, design engineers can rapidly determine the posture of assembly robots, and then, design engineers can also rapidly evaluate the assembly system using the quantitative evaluation tool and the visualization tool. In this paper, the proposed design environment is used to design an example assembly system to illustrate the effectiveness of this design environment.