The Research And Application Of Autonomous Area Module In Reconfigurable Controller

In today's competitive markets, manufacturing systems must quickly respond to changing customer demands and diminishing product life cycles. Conventional CNC-based"flexible" manufacturing system offer generalized flexibility but are generally slow and expensive since they are not optimized for any particular product or a family of products. To accommodate frequent changes in product design and to be able to process a family of products in a timely and cost-effective manner, the next generation of machine tools should be reconfigurable. Reconfigurability enables reduction not only in machine design lead time but more significantly a reduction in controller design and development time. The essential characteristics of Reconfigurable Controller include modularity, convertibility, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.This paper presents a systematic research on the core module of reconfigurable controller—Autonomous area module. The architecture of autonomous area module, which includes information awareness module, interactive interface module, central nervous system module, implementation module, is constructed, and the internal logic of the modules are analyzed. According to the research, the design of software of autonomous area module is implemented. The framework of software compose of GUI, Multimedia controller, Task controller, Motion controller and I/O controller, and all the modules are programmed in detail.The reconfiguration of controlling module in Autonomous area is the focus and innovative research in this paper. It founds the theoretical foundation of reconfiguration: first, it proposes the theory of topology structure of Autonomous area;Second, just for synchronous reconfiguration with the machine tools, it makes mathematical representation scheme using screw theory and graph theory that lays the foundation for topology structure of machine tools;Finally, compared with the topology structure of machine tools, it gets the topology structure of Autonomous area. The design and development of reconfiguration software finishes the whole process from the area of face-to-system and face-to-task.Finally, this paper gives two examples to illustrate the application of this methodology for Cutting machines that are plan cutting machine and Cutting-units machine. Moreover, the specific design of software applied in the Cuttings-units machine is presented.