Optimizing The Route of an Assembly Arm

More than one million robots are now being used worldwide. Many robots have been built for manufacturing purposes and can be found in factories around the world. The focus of this book is on Pick and Place robots which are used for assembly processes. The main application of these robots is the placement of electronic components on Printed Circuit Board (PCB). When hundreds of electronic components of different shapes and sizes have to be placed at specific positions on a PCB, finding an optimal robot traveling path is so complex and time consuming. The aim of the current book is to introduce an efficient approximation algorithm to find a sequence in which the assembly points are to be assembled. This book presents an iterative algorithm which applies a cutting model to get a shorter lower bound by adding cuts to the Linear Programming (LP) relaxations and a combined heuristic algorithm for finding an acceptable upper bound when the optimal integer solution is not found.