<title>Autonomous agent for on-machine acceptance of machined components</title>

In recent years, manufacturers of high precision mechanical parts have been required to produce increasingly complex designs, in smaller lot sizes, with improved quality. These requirements demand lower process costs, shorter development cycles and more accurate manufacturing technologies. To meet these demands, manufacturers are attempting to both improve process quality and provide better CAD/CAM integration. The technique of on-machine acceptance provides one mechanism for improving the part inspection and verification process. This approach allows one machine and one process capability model to be used for both fabrication and inspection, reducing capital cost and overall cycle time. However, the on-machine acceptance technique possesses greater potential than as simply an alternative mechanism for verifying part geometry. If the inspection capability information generated by on-machine acceptance processes can be made available to designers, it can be used to create a design-for-inspectability environment and help realize the benefits of concurrent engineering. This paper proposes a novel architecture which integrates on-machine acceptance with an agent-based concurrent design environment, for reducing both the cost and production time for high quality, small lot size, mechanical parts. This work has focused on the production of stainless steel pressure vessels at the Integrated Manufacturing Technology Laboratory (IMTL) manufacturing cell, located at Sandia National Laboratories, California.