The Application of Mechatronic Design Approach in a Reconfigurable Manufacturing Environment

Manufacturing companies are faced with the challenge of unpredictable, high frequency market changes in both local and international markets. Two types of conventional manufacturing system: dedicated manufacturing system (DMS) and flexible manufacturing system (FMS) do not longer meet the requirement of modern manufacturing. DMS were designed for mass production, while FMS was designed for batch manufacturing. These systems cannot address mass customization. There is a need for greater, more effective responsiveness by manufacturers to change in customer requirements by changing manufacturers´ manufacturing capability and capacity. To fulfill this purpose, the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) has been proposed. The advantages of this new manufacturing system are: reasonable flexibility and acceptable cost compared with the redundant flexibility and high cost which the FMS is suffering; higher reconfigurability compared with the DMS. There is a need to design a sort of reconfigurable manufacturing tools (RMTs) for RMS. But according to the literature, there is no suitable methods available yet can be applied directly to RMT design. So in this paper, we came up a novel machine design approach termed mechatronics design. By utilizing this approach, a full scale reconfigurable machining tool has been design. This RMT has a modular mechanical structure and modular control system. The mechanical design and control system design both are discussed in this paper. The experimental test compare with the performance of a traditional drilling/milling are also detailed.