Software structure for a robot operated flexible manufacturing cell

Numerous advantages of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) result in their more common usage. Application of FMS allows obtaining the high machining efficiency through high flexibility, which means the possibility to change the production to a different group of parts and to change the size of a production batch in a very short time. The number of problems in production management, process control and jobs scheduling has to be solved for proper operation of flexible system. The paper presents software and data organization for a model flexible manufacturing cell built at Poznan University of Technology within the Inco-Copernicus project. In the described system the robot is applied for material handling tasks.