Robotic manufacturing systems have proven to be an effective solution for modern manufacturing enterprises to deal with increasing in customer demands and market competition. However, these systems may be unable to completely satisfy user requirements because of the difference between user and design perspectives. Thus, designing robotic manufacturing systems requires iterative processes that significantly increase development costs and lead time. A user-customised design approach is needed that enables users to customise robotic manufacturing systems as well as alleviate the burden on designers of eliciting user requirements. However, most users may not be able to customise their systems because of a lack of engineering knowledge. The authors propose a knowledge-based engineering approach to aid users in customising the architectures of robotic manufacturing systems. Two models — an ontological knowledge model and a multi-attribute decision-making model — are defined and integrated in the proposed KBE architecture definition method. A rule-based reasoning process is proposed in the ontological knowledge model based on explicit semantic descriptions of users’ unstructured or semi-structured requirements and the components of robotic manufacturing systems, which infers the possible architecture of the required system. The MADM model is adopted to evaluate the architecture alternatives to determine the optimal solution.

The increased competitive pressure forces companies to cease distinguishing products and services, and to provide customers with highly individualised solutions. To meet this requirement, it has been proposed the concept of product–service system (PSS) that is not simply an extension of physical products by delivering non-physical services to customers, but a systematic combination of products and services. However, most current studies do not consider the multi-disciplinary integration relating to the PSS design process, during which the collaboration within the product and service design teams should be achieved. Otherwise, the large number of iterative design activities resulting from poor multi-disciplinary collaboration may lead to long development lead-times and high development cost. To achieve the multi-disciplinary integration during the PSS design process, the authors propose an integrated design method using an improved interface modelling approach that provides a structural form to represent the information transfer between product and service components. The proposed PSS design method enables the product and service design teams to decrease the iterative design activities and improve their collaboration so that a more integrated design process can be accomplished. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the design method is applied to a design case of an industrial PSS.

In order to realize the automatic drilling in aircraft assembly, a drilling end effector is designed by integrating the pressure unit, drilling unit, measurement unit, control system and frame structure. In order to reduce the hole deviation, this paper proposes a vertical normal adjustment program based on 4 laser distance sensors. The actual normal direction of workpiece surface can be calculated through the sensors measurements, and then robot posture is adjusted to realize the hole deviation correction. A base detection method is proposed to detect and locate the hole automatically by using the camera and the reference hole. The experiment results show that the position accuracy of the system is less than 0.3mm, and the normal precision is less than 0.5°. The drilling end effector and robot can greatly improve the efficiency of the aircraft parts and assembly quality, and reduce the product development cycle.