Measuring and Representing the Performance of Manufacturing Assembly Robots

With the growth of robotic technology, there is a need for performance measures to characterize and compare robots and to help determine which features are most suited to a particular application. Robot systems are complex and involve a wide range of features and performance characteristics whose importance differs depending on the application domain. This paper describes a set of assembly performance measures associated with the different features along with an exploration of how one could represent this information. It organizes the assembly measures in reference to a taxonomy of assembly skills and tasks. Arranging the performance measures in this way will simplify the task of selecting a particular robot system for an assembly task by helping focus on those aspects of the task that are most critical.