PC BASED CELL CONTROLLER FOR INTELLIGENT ROBOT SCHEDULING

摘要

This paper presents the design and implementation of an external personal computer (PC) based control methodology that is capable of analyzing information related to processing a group of parts and automatically generate and control the sequence of robot programs required to move the part through the cell. The control algorithm is fuzzy-logic based and can analyze a multi-objective problem. The production objectives considered are maximization of the throughput and machine utilization, as well as minimization of penalty for tardy jobs and robot movement times. The results are compared with two standard scheduling rules: SPT (Shortest Processing Time) and WEDD (Weighted Earliest Due Date). The results show that the developed methodology is superior when dealing with multi-objective problems. The computational time on a standard PC is found to be very minimal and hence made real-time implementation possible.