An Architecture for Agile Assembly

This short paper outlines new hardware and software technologies and methods being developed for automated assembly of precision high-value products such as magnetic storage devices, palmtop and wearable computers and other high-density equipment. Our Agile Assembly Architecture (AAA) supports the creation of miniature assembly factories (minifactories) built from small modular robotic components. The goals are to substantially reduce design and deployment times and product changeover times, greatly improve quality levels by using sensormoderated precision motion, and to achieve new levels of manufacturing system portability by shrinking the sizes of typical assembly systems from large room size to tabletop size. We are developing the key electromechanical elements including novel subproduct couriers, manipulator/feeders, and other modular components. We are implementing a distributed realtime computer architecture, modeling and simulation software, high-level network communication protocol, and graphical programming tools to support this architecture. \Real" minifactories will be programmed by directly interfacing with automatically synchronized \virtual" minifactories.