The past decade in the area of supply chain management has been characterized by increased emphasis on collaboration between trading partners. The paradigm shift from competition to collaboration has been enabled by the explosive growth of the Internet as the medium for exchange of information between a business and its supply chain partners. However, the information that is communicated between the supply chain partners is among the most critical of an organization’s assets and the Internet as a medium of communication is replete with security loopholes. Presents the design of a security architecture that supply chain practioners may implement for secure, scalable and interoperable communication of information with their trading partners. The security architecture recognizes the implicit diversity in the types of supply chain partnerships that requires different levels of security for the different types of data sharing needs between the supply chain partners.

This paper presents the outline of a conceptual control and communications architectural framework enabling agile manufacturing enterprises. A distributed intelligence control architecture model that imparts autonomous intelligence capabilities of "perception-decision-action" to machines and equipment within a manufacturing shop floor is presented. A cluster of such intelligent machines, under the supervision of the workcell controller enables flexibility and dynamic reconfigurability of manufacturing systems. In addition, the paper discusses a conceptual communications architecture framework, based on emerging technologies such as CORBA, Java, XML, etc., that may be used effectively for integrating flexible manufacturing systems into the overall manufacturing system, enabling enterprise agility.

Discusses the design and modeling fundamentals of a multiple degree of freedom reconfigurable robotic gripper system (RGS), designed to reliably automate the process of limp material handling without causing distortion, deformation and/or folding. The reconfigurable gripper design draws upon the authors' (2000) previously reported work on the flat surfaced, fixed-dimensions gripper system. The design of the reconfigurable gripper system consists of four arms in a cross-bar configuration, with a flat surfaced, fixed dimensions, suction based gripper unit mounted on each of the arms. In the paper, the kinematic and dynamic performances of the reconfigurable robotic gripper system are analyzed and then validated using 1-DEAS software.

Discusses the design and modeling fundamentals of a multi-degree-of-freedom reconfigurable robotic gripper system (RGS), designed to automate the process of limp material handling, reliably and without distortion, deformation, and/or folding. The reconfigurable gripper design draws upon a previously reported flat surfaced, fixed-dimensions gripper system (Kolluru et al., 1998). The design consists of four arms in a cross-bar configuration, with a flat surfaced, fixed dimensions, suction-based gripper unit mounted on each of the arms. The kinematic and dynamic performance of the reconfigurable RGS is analyzed theoretically and then validated using Integrated Design Engineering Analysis Software (I-DEAS) simulation software.

Proposes a solution to the two-dimensional (2-D) collision fee path planning problem for an autonomous mobile robot utilizing an electrostatic potential field (EPF) developed through a resistor network, derived to represent the environment. No assumptions are made about the amount of information contained in the a priori environment map (it may be completely empty) or the shape of the obstacles. The well-formulated and well-known laws of electrostatic fields are used to prove that the proposed approach generates an approximately optimal path (based on cell resolution) in a real-time frame. It is also proven through the classical laws of electrostatics that the derived potential function is a global navigation function (as defined by Rimon and Koditschek, 1992), that the field is free of all local minima and that all paths necessarily lead to the goal position. The complexity of the EPF generated path is shown to be O(mn/sub M/), where m is the total number of polygons in the environment and n/sub M/ is the maximum number of sides of a polygonal object. The method is tested both by simulation and experimentally on a Nomad200 mobile robot platform equipped with a ring of sixteen sonar sensors.

This paper presents an analytical model of a flat surfaced robotic gripper designed to automate the process of reliable, rapid and distortion-free limp material handling. The designed gripper prototype is integrated with an industrial robot manipulator. The gripper geometry and its grasp stability are justified. Performance of the overall system is experimentally tested, based on a set of industry dictated operational constraints. It is found that the gripper system has high reliability, grasp stability, and that it is capable of rapid rates of manipulation.

Focuses on the hierarchical, sensor based control structure for the robotics gripper system designed for handling deformable, materials. The hardware and software implementation of the designed system are used to prototype and test the system. From the presented results, it can be concluded that the robotic gripper system integrated with the implemented control architecture, performs at its fullest potential, with highest performance when using both visual and non-visual proximity sensors to assist the process of object manipulation. While the reliability is tremendously high when using vision and proximity sensors for manipulation, the number of panels manipulated per minute decreases significantly, as the speed of the belt increases. It is concluded that if the speed of the belt were to be kept below 50% of its maximum, using both vision and proximity sensors (robot speed of 100%) results in a highly reliable manipulation of about 13-15 panels of fabric per minute, thus exceeding the system requirements of 8-10 panels per minute.

The objective of this paper is to present the design, analytical modeling and performance evaluation of a flat surfaced robotic gripper designed to automate the process of reliable, rapid and distortion-free limp material handling. The geometric model of the gripper and its grasp stability are analyzed leading to justification of the overall system design. The paper reviews the existing state-of-the-art technology in limp material handling, and presents the design and modeling of the robotic gripper system. Finally, the experimental results are presented.