An Industry 4.0 Cyber-Physical Framework for Micro Devices Assembly

An advanced cyber manufacturing framework to support the collaborative assembly of micro devices is presented based on Industry 4.0 principles. The distributed cyber and physical components work together to plan, assemble and monitor micro assembly related tasks; micro assembly refers to the assembly of micron sized devices which cannot be manufactured by MEMS technologies. The collaborative framework proposed includes assembly planning and path planning modules, Virtual Reality based assembly simulation environments and physical assembly work cells. An ontology based approach was implemented to address semantic interoperability issues to support formation of temporary partnerships in a Virtual Enterprise context. The key to the design and implementation of this complex framework is an information centric process modeling approach which provides a data/information oriented basis for collaboration. A collaborative cyber physical test bed has been built to demonstrate feasibility of proposed framework and approach.