A planning system to manipulate metal sheets within a workcell simulator

Our planner allows the extraction of the metal sheets from a press-brake. Since the solution must respect safety standard, this operation can be very complex. For this reason it is useful to usean automatic system to plan these operations. Thus, we have developed a specific planning algorithm, called EFT (Exit from Tools), that utilizes a hybrid approach, combining a probabilistic roadmap with standard operations on the Cartesian configuration space. In addition, our algorithm has the important feature to be automatically reconfigurable. We performed several tests solving a set of critical real cases by WorkCellSimulator, an industrial software system for simulating manufacturing processing.