Practice for planning and realization of advanced industrial robot systems

Conception, planning, realization and installation of industrial robot systems requires the integration of many components that are not designed to work together. In this course many design decisions need to be taken and a significant part of the cost of a robot system is caused by design and integration activities. This holds true particularly for complex or new robot systems as often found in applied research. The main challenges in design and integration of the different components and the state of the art in component integration are presented in this paper. The practice shows that even today where elaborate simulation tools are available practical experiments at early stages of system realization are required. Furthermore, even an economically feasible robot cell might not be economically feasible as a whole if it does not harmonize well with up- and downstream processes.