Rapid Deployment Automation: Technical Challenges

Abstract

Product life cycles have shortened to 1–2 years in many industries, causing increased interest in flexible automation. However it still often takes 1–2 years to sell and install a robot system. We would like to shorten this time by a factor of ten to 2–3 months. In order to achieve this we must be able to design automation systems in a matter of days, build and install them in a matter of weeks, and train them in a few hours. Adept is pursuing a technical approach to this challenge based on geometric modeling and reasoning, sensor- based part feeding and assembly, and smart application packages. Significant technical challenges remain, including acquiring models or parts quickly and automatically, 3-D machine vision, assembly strategies which reason about geometric uncertainties, error representation and recovery, and simple teaching techniques. Adept’s current approach is described and technical challenges are discussed.