The Automated Assembly Team contributions to the APRIMED Agile Manufacturing Project
The Automated Assembly Team of the APRIMED Project (abbreviated as A{prime}) consists of two parts: the Archimedes Project, which is an ongoing project developing automated assembly technology, and the A{prime} 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{prime} robot team designed, developed, and implemented a flexible robot workcell which served as the automated factory of the A{prime} 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{prime} robot team to the A{prime} 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{prime} project. We also present the work of the A{prime} robot team in designing and developing the A{prime} robot workcell, including all tooling and programming to support assembly of the A{prime} discriminator devices. Finally, we discuss the process changes which these technologies have enabled in the A{prime} project.