Manufacturability and assemblability considerations are of paramount importance at this stage due to the nature of the hardware being used, and the sharing of the hardware with other student teams working on different products. Two and three-dimensional toolpaths are created in Mastercam in preparation for the CNC machining phase of the project. These toolpaths are verified in Mastercam, post processed, and downloaded to the Kryle VMC using serial links. The teams develop and fabricate the fixtures for the assembly of their products. This stage takes some planning and co-ordination among the various teams and ultimately results in sets of inserts in order to accommodate different product configurations.
Students then develop robot programs for assembly and teach all necessary points.
The final stage involves the development of supervisory control and integration solutions using the CIManager software. Device drivers needed to communicate with external equipment are custom-developed inside the CIManager environment. The interrelationships of the modules that students work with is shown in Figure 2 . Students handle lower levels of integration by using serial links to the equipment on the shop floor. Integration across multiple cells is handled using CIManager's networking capabilities and the ethernet in the facility.