This research area focuses on the design, configuration, selection and integration of industrial robots in a production environment, targeting the right trade-off between accuracy, productivity, reliability and investment costs. Moreover a comprehensive understanding of the manufacturing process to be executed is applied, as also a complete analysis of the way the robot cooperates with the surrounding resources such as operating machines and human operators.
In the phase of developing a robotic system or island, the design of new robotic solution plays a major leverage towards agility. Particularly, Reconfigurable industrial robots present uncountable advantages in manufacturing context characterized by rapid evolutions of the product geometric and technological features along with the production demand. They are versatile and more adaptive than conventional systems as the ability to reconfigure allows a robot to disassemble and reassemble to form new morphologies that are better suited for new tasks. They are robust as robot parts are interchangeable and faulty parts can be replaced autonomously, thus leading to self-repair behaviors. Finally, they are cost-effective considering the range of complex solutions which can be made from one set of modules, saving costs through reuse.
The development of reconfigurable robots is a complex multi-step engineering process starting from a comprehensive analysis of the family of products and addressing various tasks ranging from mechatronics to dynamic control, all finalized to customize the robot solution on the user requirements.

Competences:

• Design and configuration of robotic island and systems
• Design of reconfigurable industrial robots
• Advanced modeling of kinematics and dynamics for industrial robots
• Design of fully integrated automation project
• Control infrastructure for industrial robots
• Path and trajectory planning design, optimization and control
• Process planning, task sequencing and dispatching
• System ramp-up and monitoring

Industrial applications:

• Micro-precision manufacturing applications
• Soldering, bonding and mechanical manipulation for Optoelectronics
• Deposition and subtraction technologies supporting green and brown field manufacturing