Manufacturing end-user: Robert Bosch España, Fábrica de Castellet, Barcelona, Spain (BOS)
Description of the Experiment:
Robert Bosch España, Fábrica de Castellet produces Wiper System assemblies (WSA). This pilot experiment is dedicated to the automotive industry and will be implemented in this assembling line (Front Wiper Systems - WSA). Depending on each car design, windshields come in different sizes and require appropriately sized front wiper systems to ensure efficient, reliable windshield clean. A single production line for WSA manufacturing is made by several working stations: about seven which are fully automatic, one semi-automatic and finally five manual working stations. The production line made by these workstations work in a sequence for assembling the different components making the WSA. The proposed pilot will be focused on the last workstation – the final verification, which is one of the bottlenecks of the WSA production line.
After the final assembly station every part has to be placed on the delivery box to be sent to the customer. The operator gets the WSA product from the conveyor belt and visually checks it before placing it in the box.
This process remain manual because of the worker flexibility, to not only check various parts in different places, but also because he can easily adapt to a huge quantity of combinations of WSA’s, control features and containers layers.
This type of work puts workers in occupational hazards and health issues hurting their back, wrist, producing arm harm or hitting their fingers.
HORSE project provides a Robotic integrated system without fences, designed by the experts of Bosch, KUKA, TUE, TUM and TNO which picks up the product, automatically checks its quality and places it in the right way of every layer of the predefined box. The human and robotic agent collaboration is controlled and monitored by a Manufacturing Process Management System to ensure cycle time. In addition the safety is enhanced by the cell monitoring system of FZI.
Challenges addressed:
- Automated packaging of Wiper Systems
- Operator’s Safety and product quality with the required cycle time
- Flexibility for several product dimensions and weights as well for customer packaging diversity and new product variations.
- Solution robustness regarding: compatibility among systems and standard equipment
- Guarantee return of Investment
Solution:
- Automated packaging of Wiper Systems, including artificial visual quality check of parts, to replace current situation (manual)
- Augmented Reality assistance for manually checking points on parts that have been assessed as potentially faulty
- Orchestration and monitoring of robotic and human tasks, including mobile messages to workers
Benefits:
- Less (mental and body) stress load for operators. This involves reduction of the occupational health hazard on workers. Also improved working conditions, in line with the regulations that restrict maximum weight loaded in a day. Risks related to wrist, arm and back harm risks are eliminated, the worker health will be improved, and stress reduced for operator control.
- Improved flexibility: coping with fluctuating production volumes, various products and large changeover times. HORSE will be able to rapidly reorganize production lines and to change the location of part assembly and associated production tools.
- Increased productivity, efficiency and flexibility for the diverse products during quality inspection as well as improved flexibility to cope with fluctuating production volumes, various products and large changeover times. HORSE will be able to rapidly reorganize production lines and to change the location of part assembly and associated production tools. Reduced production stop for reconfiguration (due to 1. optimisation 2. flexibility 3. H-R collaboration).
- Big potential replication of the benefits in BOSCH factories all over the world.
Sector/s of Application:
- Main Sector of Application: Supplier of automotive industry
- Potential Sector/s of Application: The HORSE experiment is scalable to industries / applications which are characterized by the following parameters: necessity for human-robot co-manipulation. Examples of these industries / applications are: heavy industry including automotive, aviation, etc. This scalability to other industries and applications will be demonstrated via experiments acquired by Open Calls for RTD proposals.
