Applicability of Human-Robot Collaboration to Small Batch Production
In the past years, the use of industrial robots was on the rise. Today, they are used for mass production in large enterprises. On the contrary, deployment of robots in small enterprises is lagging behind. Programming time is usually two orders of magnitu
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Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy {dario.antonelli,sergey.astanin,giulia.bruno}@polito.it
Abstract. In the past years, the use of industrial robots was on the rise. Today, they are used for mass production in large enterprises. On the contrary, deploy‐ ment of robots in small enterprises is lagging behind. Programming time is usually two orders of magnitude larger than the cycle time, and this fact severely limits applicability of robots in small batch production. This work analyzes opportuni‐ ties to profitably employ robots also in this case through the adoption of the human-robot collaboration. A collaboration paradigm is proposed, where the tasks are assigned to robotic and human workers based on the batch size, task programming complexity (time), and manual execution time. The validity of this approach is demonstrated in a case study conducted in a collaborative humanrobot work cell. Keywords: Human-robot collaboration · Collective ability · Manufacturing cell · Small batch production · Robotics
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Introduction
For small production volume, some manufacturing operations (e.g., machine loading and unloading, part inspection, part cleaning, bin picking, kitting) are largely done manually [1]. In contrast, a lot of these operations are performed by robots in mass production lines, such as in the automotive industry [2, 3]. This fact clearly shows the potential of robots for the execution of certain manufacturing operations. Significant efforts are needed to overcome the barriers that prevent SMEs from automating their processes, since many of the traditional industrial robots are not considered useful in this context due to high setup and maintenance costs, safety concerns, and lack of general-purpose capabilities [4]. Setting up purely robotic work cells is not a viable option for most SMEs, because the economic efficiency of robots’ use is often undermined by (i) the costs of the implementation of a fully automatic work cell and (ii) the costs and the duration of robot programming for every new task. Human-robot collaboration can address these issues by relying on human workers for the tasks which are expensive to automate. There are two kinds of human-robot collaboration: spatial collaboration (actors share the workspace but don’t work simul‐ taneously) and temporal collaboration (actors work simultaneously but in different © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved H. Afsarmanesh et al. (Eds.): PRO-VE 2016, IFIP AICT 480, pp. 24–32, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45390-3_3
Applicability of Human-Robot Collaboration to Small Batch Production
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spaces) [5]. Spatial collaboration is the easiest to implement using the off-the-shelf industrial robots, so this is the kind of collaboration this work refers to. In this paper the issue of assessing the economic advantage of a collaborative humanrobotic cell is addressed from t
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