Model-Based Evaluation of Cooperative Assembly Processes in Human-Robot Collaboration
The increasing variety in product range demand high flexibility of the production technologies and assembly systems of producing companies. Integrating the human into the assembly process by establishing collaboration between the human and robotized assem
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Abstract The increasing variety in product range demand high flexibility of the production technologies and assembly systems of producing companies. Integrating the human into the assembly process by establishing collaboration between the human and robotized assembly systems seems to be a promising approach to achieve this flexibility even for very small lot sizes. This paper presents a model for assessing the ergonomic risk in such collaboration scenarios. Criteria for assigning assembly steps to the human or the robot are introduced as well as for describing the physical and cognitive ergonomic risk of an individual assembly step. The presented risk model is finally applied to the process of assembly sequence planning, in order to find the optimal assembly sequence in situations of human-robot collaboration. Keywords Human-robot collaboration modeling
Ergonomic work conditions
Risk
1 Introduction Individualized and customized products get increasingly important. Otherwise, companies cannot satisfy sufficiently the specific customer demands or lose their position in the global markets. These demands result simultaneously in a large M. Faber (&) S. Kuz A. Mertens C.M. Schlick Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics of RWTH, Aachen University, Bergdriesch 27, 52062 Aachen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Kuz e-mail: [email protected] A. Mertens e-mail: [email protected] C.M. Schlick e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 C. Schlick and S. Trzcieliński (eds.), Advances in Ergonomics of Manufacturing: Managing the Enterprise of the Future, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 490, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41697-7_10
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variety in product range and consequently in smaller lot sizes. Traditionally automated production systems fail to cope with such a variety, because their automation is not flexible enough to produce all variants of a product efficiently [1]. This is one of the reasons why products of small lot sizes are usually assembled manually by highly qualified and skilled workers [2]. The automated assembly would instead require manual adjustments of robotic control programs or redevelopment of parts of these programs for each new product variant. For flexibility and economical purposes, the amount of these non-value adding production processes should be reduced to a minimum. One approach to achieve the desired flexibility of an assembly system is to combine an appropriate level of automation with human skills [3, 4]. Considering the human operator as an integral part of the production system combines the power of machines with extensive human skills. Due to the unique cognitive and sensorimotor skills of the human, the operator is able to take over assembly steps that cannot be automated by today’s assembly systems such as handling limp components. Experience and creative thinking let the operator find solutions even to unstructured, not well-defined problems. In contrast, the robo
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