A new human-robot collaboration assembly system for cellular manufacturing

Abstract

Cellular manufacturing meets the diversified production and quantity requirements flexibly. However, its efficiency mainly depends on the operators' working performance. In order to improve its efficiency, an effective assembly-support system is required to assist operators during the assembly process. In this paper, a multi-modal assembly-support system (MASS) was proposed, which aims to support operators from both informational aspect and physical aspect. To protect operators in MASS system, several safety designs in both hardware and control levels were also discussed. With the informational support and physical support from the MASS system, the assembly complexity and the operators' burden are reduced. To evaluate the effect of MASS, a group of operators were required to execute a cable harness task. From the experimental results, it can be concluded that by using this system, the operators' assembly performance was improved, and the efficiency of the cellular manufacturing was also improved.