The trend of increasingly automated tightening stations in the motor vehicle powertrain production industry, is driving the tooling industry to adapt its of-fering. This thesis aims to answer the question if collaborative robots (cobots) are suitable for tightening applications in motor vehicle engine assembly lines. A collaborative robot is in principle similar to a conventional industrial robotic arm. The part that differentiates it from an industrial robot is its ability to detect and in some cases prevent a collision with a human of close proximity. In order to answer this question three case studies are conducted where the deployment of collaborative robots is assessed. To specifically answer the case of a motor vehicle engine line, two lines are mapped station by station. Then these stations are recreated with a collaborative robot and a tightening tool and a few applications are tested on an actual motor. The rest is simulated with equations, dictating how much time is needed to complete a sequence of tightenings.As a result, most stations on a motor vehicle assembly line could in theory be done by using tightening tools together with one or multiple collaborative robots. However, these kinds of lines are often highly automated. For this rea-son large industrial robots and multi-tool fixtures are preferred today. The large volumes of these lines, mostly mitigate the expected financial gains of replacing a human operator with a cobot. In many cases, the cobot would not have the time to complete all bolts of an application on an engine within the give takt time. Multi-cylinder engines (which is the absolute norm for passenger cars) have too many bolts for one cobot and tool to complete. If multiple cobots are to be used, the cost of the station further increases. Furthermore, re-balancing a line simply to accommodate a cobot would also not be beneficial.Probably a much better application for collaborative robots and tightening tools are smaller, more operator dependent lines. Here the value of a cobot can be ...
Feasibility analysis of cobots for automation of tightening stations in motor vehicle engine assembly lines
2020-01-01
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
DDC: | 629 |
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