Scheduling of Dual-Arm Multi-tool Assembly Robots and Workspace Layout Optimization

Abstract

The profitability of any assembly robot installation depends on the production throughput, and to an even greater extent on incurred costs. Most of the cost comes from manually designing the layout and programming the robot as well as production downtime. With ever smaller production series, fewer products share this cost. In this work, we present the dual arm assembly program as an integrated routing and scheduling problem with complex arm-to-arm collision avoidance. We also present a set of high-level layout decisions, and we propose a unified CP model to solve the joint problem. The model is evaluated on realistic instances and real data. The model finds high-quality solutions in short time, and proves optimality for all evaluated problem instances, which demonstrates the potential of the approach.