Programming and Recovery in Cells for Factory Automation

This paper explores some of the critical issues in the development of factory automation systems. Amongst the most significant of these can be considered the role of people, the generation of controls software, the reconfiguration of the manufacturing hardware and software to allow an increased variety of tasks to be carried out and automatic error recovery. This paper reports the design and operation of a cell exploring potential solutions to some of the problems arising from these issues and presents further thoughts on their solution.