Companies in every industry are increasingly faced with the need to introduce automated production systems. This traditionally involves rigid scheduling by experts, often from outside the company, to optimize lines dedicated to fixed production (e.g., an automobile). For Small and Medium Enterprises, however, this approach is difficult to replicate due to a lack of operators and technicians with specific skills and dynamic scenarios characterized by small batches and a wide variety of processes and products.
To address these limitations, the Sustainable Production Systems (SPS) Laboratory of the Institute of Systems and Technologies for Sustainable Production (ISTePS), in collaboration with and srl, has developed a flexible and reconfigurable workstation applied to perform soldering, cleaning and polishing operations of tweezers within the Ideal-Tek company. This process, previously performed manually, was in fact very monotonous and repetitive, as well as requiring constant concentration on the part of the operator and posing potential health and safety risks.
The work, funded by the Horizon 2020 fund as part of the project, demonstrated the benefit of introducing collaborative robots even for SMEs characterized by high-mix, low-volume production through proper configuration, setup and programming.
"There is no financial sustainability for us in buying a cobot if we cannot change almost every week the tasks it has to perform. For Ideal-tek, rapid cell design and configuration take precedence over forced optimization; easy integration into existing work cells is preferred over complete implementation of a new line," explains Salvatore Alivesi, VP of Operations at Ideal-tek.
Well-designed user interfaces and procedures also make it possible to support unskilled operators in using and configuring collaborative robots, even for complex tasks.
"The project was incredibly challenging in many ways, such as lasting less than a year and having to tackle the complete development of the cell and supporting solutions from scratch. The operations to be performed by the cobot are very complex and few similar examples exist in the relevant literature. Despite these difficulties, thanks to the efforts of the SPS Lab Team and with the help of some collaborative robots from our "," we have been able to test the solutions developed from time to time, significantly reducing the implementation time and achieving the expected results," concludes Elias Montini, SPS-ISTePS Researcher.
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