Flexible Assembly Automation with New Robot Station

Abstract

Nowadays, on average, about 40% of employees in manufacturing industry are engaged in assembly work.

Manual assembly, sometimes with the aid of automatic tools such as screw-tighteners, is still the predominant assembly method. The main reasons for the low degree of automation are:

• 1. that products have not been adapted for automatic assembly

• 2. there has not been equipment flexible enough to be profitable for short production runs

• 3. there have not been sufficiently fast and sophisticated robots.

However, there is a big demand for the automation of assembly work. For the assembly worker, the work often involves lifting heavy objects, performing repetitive motions, and a hectic workrate, all of which results in physical strain, leading to absence. More complex assembly work, for example many variants of a product, also means that industry is demanding tighter quality control and monitoring than can be achived with manual techniques.

To make automation possible, the ‘design for assembly’ approach is becoming increasingly widespread in industry. At generation changes, efforts are made to improve product design with a view to automatic assembly.

The introduction by ASEA of the first IRB 1000 robot and standardised peripherals means that there is now a totally new way of carrying out flexible assembly work with short cycle times.