A two-robot printed circuit board assembly system

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of printed circuit board (PCB) assembly using multiple robots simultaneously and sequentially. In particular, a two-concurrent-robot assembly system with fixed table and two fixed magazines is considered. The objective of the procedure is the minimization of the assembly cycle times, defined as the longer of the two robot total assembly times, while avoiding collision between the robots. An example problem is given to demonstrate the use of the procedure in the two-robot assembly PCB system. To analyse the advantages of the two-concurrent-robot PCB assembly system, assembly cycle time and flow time of this system are compared with those of a two-robot sequential PCB assembly system. The computational results generated from a set of test problems demonstrate the performance of the developed algorithms.