| dc.description.abstract | With the increasing demand for customized products, companies have to be on a constant lookout for better and more efficient ways to develop and manufacture in order to remain relevant in the market. This follows several challenges for the industry. One, is that the underlying development processes have to be flexible and efficient, avoiding repetitive workloads. This in turn enables workers to direct attention towards more creative and innovative tasks.
As the product development consists of several engineering tools and software platforms, the transition between them also needs to be investigated. When transitioning between tools and file-formats relevant information is often lost in the process, again leading to repetitive work in redefining lost information. Another challenge is related to a desire to adopt robotic automation into the manufacturing process, which requires similar attention to the processes. Through the Present-day robotic welding is inefficient, and changes in product geometry induced by high-mix-low-volume demands often lead to the creation of partly or entirely new robot programs.
This thesis aims to provide extended theory to these problem domains by investigating, adapting, and expanding state-of-the-art methodologies in knowledge-based engineering, integrated solutions, topological feature recognition techniques, and automatic robot program generation. This extended theory, based on the culmination of these research subjects, is aimed at benefiting the aforementioned industries as well as providing better grounds for the implementation of robotic welding.
In total, five main contributions are presented to constitute the research process, starting with theory in the conceptualization of knowledge in an integrated framework to better manage and store knowledge throughout the multitude of engineering tools. After this, each paper expands the work closer and closer to automated robotic welding, building on the previously mentioned research subjects, targeting problematic use-cases provided by industrial partners. In particular, the process of defining welds in CAD and transferring weld-related information and knowledge down the development cycle, as well as the automatic generation of robot programs.
Although, the presented work has significantly increased the body of knowledge towards realizing fully functional automatic, flexible, and stable systems for CAD-to-robot welding, further research is required before a plugand-play solution can be adapted by the industry. Furthermore, the realization of such systems requires additional collaboration with the other research subjects in the project, such as real-time sensing policies and pre-calibration systems, as well as the adaptation of commercial offline programming software to become viable solutions. | en_US |
