Manufacturing Cells

This work is intended to examine the issues surrounding the integration of manufacturing cells and small manufacturing systems. It draws together the work of a number of groups operating in the same field. Automated manufacturing cells are the building blocks of CAD/CAM systems and cover a number of different manufacturing applications such as prismatic metal cutting using machine centres, revolute metal cutting using turning centres, electronic assembly using industrial robots and placement machines and a wide range of robotic processing applications. Increasingly, such cells are being introduced in the manufacturing plant and progressively integrated into larger plant-wide automation and factory control systems. The actual task of integrating the CAD/CAM cells is computationally complex, and this book focuses on techniques that allow the effective and fast integration of manufacturing devices into automated manufacturing cells and then, in turn, techniques which allow the integration of such cells into the complete manufacturing system.
An understanding of these techniques is seen by the authors of the book to be essential to the manufacturing community before it can begin to exploit such cells either as stand-alone tools or as integrated applications.