Development of Upgradable Cellular Machines for Environmentally Conscious Products

Abstract To reduce material and energy consumption and amount of disposal, prolongment of product's lifetime is quite promising. Such longer-life products should have functional upgradability besides reliability and fault-tolerance, because most customers buy a new product when the old one is functionally out-of-date. For this purpose, this paper proposes the upgradable cellular machine. A cellular machine is a flexible modular machine that consists of autonomous and intelligent units (called “cells”). This paper demonstrates the upgradability of the cellular machine by illustrating the development of an experimental cellular assembly system based on the cellular automatic warehouse which the authors' group has already developed.