Robotic assembly planning and control with enhanced adaptability through function blocks

Manufacturing companies today need to maintain a high level of flexibility and adaptability to deal with uncertainties on dynamic shop floors, including, e.g. cutting tool shortage, part supply interruption, urgent job insertion or delay and machine unavailability. Such uncertainties are characteristic in component assembly operations. Addressing the problem, we propose a new method using function blocks to achieve much improved adaptability in assembly planning and robot control. In this paper, we propose to use event-driven function blocks for robotic assembly, aiming to plan trajectory and execute assembly tasks in real time. It is envisioned that this approach will achieve better adaptability if applied to real-world applications.