The Automated Assembly Team Contributions to the APRIMED Agile Manufacturing Project

The Automated Assembly Team of the APRIMED' Project (abbreviated as A' herein) consists of two parts: the Archimedes Project, which is an ongoing project developing automated assembly technology, and the A' Robot Team. Archimedes is a second generation assembly planning system that both provides a general high-level assembly sequencing capability and, for a smaller class of products, facilitates automatic programming of a robotic workcell to assemble them. The A' robot team designed, developed, and implemented a flexible robot workcell which served as the automated factory of the A' project. In this document we briefly describe the role of automated assembly planning in agile manufacturing, and specifically describe the contributions of the Archimedes project and the A' robot team to the A' project. We introduce the concepts of the Archimedes automated assembly planning project, and discuss the enhancements to Archimedes which were developed in response to the needs of the A' project. We also present the work of the A' robot team in designing and developing the A' robot workcell, including all tooling and programming to support assembly of the A' discriminator devices. Finally, we discuss the process changes which these technologies have enabled in the A' project. APRIMED stands for Agile Product Realization of Innovative ElectroMEchanical Devices, a Sandia National Laboratories project that was active from the summer of 1993 until March 31, 1995. The acronym APRIMED is often written with the mathematical "prime symbol," as A'. % DISTRIBUTION OF THIS DOCUMENT IS UNLIMITED