The next stage in the use of robots for assembly

✍ Scribed by A.H. Redford

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 391 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0890-6955
• DOI: 10.1016/0890-6955(88)90018-1

✦ Synopsis

For single station robot assembly steps are already being taken to address the need for fast reconformability, low operator involvement and minimal equipment dedicated to specific parts or products. With standard serial assembly. however. the special equipment costs are still often too high to allow the economic assembly of products with total production volumes of less than 50,000 units and unfortunately many products are manufactured with volumes smaller than this. It becomes necessary therefore to reduce the effective cost of the re-useable equipment; this is discussed in the current paper.

INTRODUCfION

IF ROBOTS are to be utilised in assembly on a large scale, this will be at the expense of manual assembly which accounts for over 90 per cent of all electro-mechanical and mechanical sub-assembly tasks. Currently, using assembly robots for tasks for which they are best suited (single product with variants, a market life in excess of 2 yrs, 100 ,0(~200,OOO per yr of the product and up to , say, 20 parts per product) gives a