Design and motion planning of body-in-white assembly cells

This paper proposes a method for the automatic and simultaneous identification of the body-in-white assembly cell design and motion plan. The method solution is based on an iterative algorithm that looks for a global optimum by iteratively identifying the optimum of three sub-problems. These sub-problems concern system layout design and motion planning for single and multi-robot systems, while collision detection is addressed. The sub-problems are handled through ad-hoc developed Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) models. The proposed solution overcomes the limitations of the current design and motion plan approaches. In fact, the design of body-in-white assembly cell and the robot motion planning are two time-expensive and interconnected activities, up to now generally managed from different human operators. The resolution of these two activities as non-interrelated could lead to an increase of the engineer-to-order time and a reduction of the solution quality. Thus, a test bed is described in order to prove the applicability of the approach.