Organisers
Ales Ude, Jozef Stefan Institute
Igor Kovac, Jozef Stefan Institute
Christian Schlette, RWTH Aachen
Rune Larsen, Blue Ocean Robotics
T. Rajeeth Savarimuthu, University of Southern Denmark
Rapid changes in market demands lead to decreasing product life cycle times and also more frequent products launches. An enterprise has to react fast, efficiently, and in an economically justified way to market changes. More frequent changeovers in product type or in a number of products require new engineering and production methodologies and machinery equipment to enable shorter set-up times of production environments.
Robots as highly flexible devices have been successfully utilized in many industrial production processes. However, companies are still reluctant to employ robots for many types of tasks. The main hindrances are complexities involved in setting-up robot–based automated solutions because these usually require expert knowledge and also significant time for testing and fine-tuning. Looking at robotic systems in more detail, we can recognise that these problems are due to the long time needed to re-configure and re-programme the robot workcell for a new production task.
The goal of this workshop is to find out how technologies such as efficient robot programming, sensing, and passively reconfigurable elements can contribute to faster set-up times of robotic workcells. We plan to make the round table discussion available either in video form or as a short report on the workshop webpage. The results of the workshop will elucidate what technologies are needed to shorten setup times of robotic workcells and where more research is needed in the future.
Agenda of the workshop
16.15 – 16.30 : Flexible Production vs. Agile Production, Wolfgang Zitz, Magna Steyr
16.30 – 16.45 : Pick-it – Robot binpicking with 3D cameras for non-vision experts, Peter Soetens, Intermodalics
16.45 – 17.00 : Industry 4.0 – Cyber Physical Systems – Challenges and requirements, Egon Müller, University of Chemnitz
17.00 – 17.15 : New user interfaces for industrial automation based on 3D simulation, Christian Schlette, RWTH Aachen
17.15 – 17.45 : Round table – Implementation of robotic workcells suitable for fast setup of new production processes