A Reconfigurable Robot Workcell in the Automotive Industry (original) (raw)
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Rapid Hardware and Software Reconfiguration in a Robotic Workcell
In an increasingly competitive manufacturing industry it is becoming ever more important to rapidly react to changes in market demands. In order to satisfy these requirements , it is crucial that automated manufacturing processes are flexible and can be adapted to new production requirements quickly. In this paper we present a novel automatically recon-figurable robot workcell that addresses the issues of flexible manufacturing. The proposed workcell is reconfigurable in terms of hardware and software. The hardware elements of the workcell, both those selected off-the-shelf and those developed specifically for the system, allow for fast cell setup and recon-figuration, while the software aims to provide a modular, robot-independent, ROS-based programming environment. While the proposed workcell is being developed in such a way as to address the needs of production-oriented SMEs where batch sizes are relatively small, it will also be of interest to enterprises with larger production lines since it additionally targets high performance in terms of speed, interoperability of robotic elements, and ease of use.
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The manufacturing industry is seeing an increase in demand for more custom-made, low-volume production. This type of production is rarely automated and is to a large extent still performed manually. To keep up with the competition and market demands, manufacturers will have to undertake the effort to automate such manufacturing processes. However, automating low-volume production is no small feat as the solution should be adaptable and future proof to unexpected changes in customers' demands. In this paper, we propose a re-configurable robot workcell aimed at automating low-volume production. The developed workcell can adapt to the changes in manufacturing processes by employing a number of passive, reconfigurable hardware elements, supported by the ROS-based, modular control software. To further facilitate and expedite the setup process, we integrated intuitive, user-friendly robot programming methods with the available hardware. The system was evaluated by implementing five production processes from different manufacturing industries.
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Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) often have small batch production. It leads to decreasing product lifetimes and also to more frequent product launches. In order to assist such production, a highly reconfigurable robot workcell is being developed. In this work, a visual inspection system designed for the robot workcell is presented and discussed in the context of the automotive light assembly example. The proposed framework is implemented using ROS and OpenCV libraries. We describe the hardware and software components of the framework and explain the system's benefits when compared to other commercial packages.
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The European industry is becoming more customer centric in an approach to meet the varying customers’ demand and minimize the costs of large inventories. The optimized production capacity that is achieved by the fixed production model can no longer guarantee the sustainability inside a fluctuating market that constantly requests new models. This creates the need to deploy flexible production systems exploiting the capabilities of multiple resources including both robots and human operators. Motivated by this need, this paper introduces the usage of mobile dual arm robots that are able to autonomously navigate in different workstations to undertake multiple operations, acting as assistants to human workers. A digital world model infrastructure for enabling this dynamic performance achieving process level reconfiguration, through robot’s behavior adaptation is discussed. This system is based on a multiple sensor data synthesis mechanism that facilitates the real time shopfloor status ...