Laboratory of Flexible Manufacturing System for Drawingless Manufacturing Peter KOSTAL a , Daynier Rolando DELGADO SOBRINO b , Radovan HOLUBEK c , Roman RUŽAROVSKÝ c Slovak University of Technology, Faculty of Material Science and Technology, Institute of Production Devices and Applied Mechanics, Paulínska 16, 91724 Trnava, Slovak Republic a peter.kostal@stuba.sk , b daynier_sobrino@stuba.sk , c radovan.holudek@stuba.sk , d roman.ruzarovský@stuba.sk Keywords: drawingless manufacturing, flexible manufacturing system, industrial robot, material flow Abstract. Flexible Manufacturing Systems provide a fast reaction possibility to the changes in production conditions. As production conditions change, other changes in the final product like changes of the product variants, or other unpredictable events may be also expected. For achieving a quick responsibility of production, it is necessary to leave the traditional form of production process planning. Nowadays most of the products are designed by using the CAx software. The product design 3D model contains not only the geometrical data of product, but may contain a part of the process plan and technological data as well. Introduction At present, in Slovakia the industrial production structure and management suitable for large batch production of a narrow product spectrum is predominating. However, such a production structure and management is not satisfactory anymore as the tendency of user individualization manifests more and more also among customers of Slovak industrial companies. In consequence of small flexibility in responding to market demands (customers), the competitiveness of manufacturers is going down and they are outrun by competitors with no or small tradition in machine industry but with an ability to respond to requirements of customers much more flexibly. [1] One of the possible way to production costs decreasing is a wilder using the new technological approaches represented by flexible manufacturing systems for the drawingless production. The other today’s actual possibility is using the dry cutting and hard machining. These possibilities are described in [2], [3], [4]. Flexible manufacturing system is a system that is able to respond to changed conditions. In general, this flexibility is divided into two key categories and several subcategories. The first category is the so called machine flexibility which enables to make various products by the given machinery. The second category is routing flexibility enabling to execute the same operation by various machines. Flexible manufacturing systems usually consist of three main parts: CNC machine tools, transport system and control system. A higher level of flexible manufacturing systems is represented by the so called intelligent manufacturing systems. At our institute we build a laboratory of flexible production systems for the drawingless environment. The main target of the project is to build up a laboratory with a flexible manufacturing system consisting of two NC controlled machines (milling machine and lathe). These machines will be interconnected by a transport system and operated by industrial robots. This flexible manufacturing system will also include a quality control station including a camera system and shelf storage. [1]