| dc.description.abstract | Over the years, the level of automation has increased dramatically, and robots and the advancement of collaborative robotics have benefited the production industries greatly. Collaborative robots have been introduced as a new form of industrial robotics operating with humans to share workloads. These robots have the potential to allow human-robot collaboration (HRC) for scalable automation. However, the implementation of these robots in industrial environments, especially in an HMLV or complex process entails a variety of problems. Thus, this thesis aims to evaluate on the system and technical level in integrating collaborative robots in a pick-and-place process in a spare kit packing line in collaboration with Sperre Industri AS and NTNU Manulab’s available collaborative robots whose impact will be analyzed by lean methodology.
Through Lean methodology, the results demonstrate that integrating collaborative robots into an HMLV production line is more structured and systematic that gives an overview of both the existing manual process and automated pick-and-place process in the Sperre Industry packaging line. By evaluating the results CoBOt as the future state of the process has a 91% of value-added activities compared to the 44% of the manual process. In other words, integrating CoBOt in the pick-and-place process will have a 47% improvement in the value-added activities. Furthermore, integrating cobots will eliminate and reduced wastes such as transportation and control from 56% to 9%. This means that the robots are doing more activities that add value to the product than the manual processes. CoBots are good in repetitive tasks, to reduce labor costs and ensure consistent quality control of the process. However, the implementation of these robots in industrial environments, especially in an HMLV entails a variety of negative impacts. Such as the current grippers are not able to handle some of the components properly because they have uneven shapes, are flexible and irregular, have different textures, and are very sensitive to being damaged. After performing a basic pick and place test of the grippers with a modification of the end-effector of adaptive gripper 2F-140, from the initial 40% of spare kits that can be picked up it has increased to 68%, and the remaining 20% of spare kits can only be picked up by vacuum gripper, resulting in a total of 88% of the components that can be picked up by the available gripper in Manulab. Due to gripper limitations and availability, the remaining 12% of spare kits cannot be tested which part of the technological issues. This result gives a negative impact of CoBot in the cost-benefit analysis. However, the results and conclusion of this thesis do not mean that it could be generalized for another company and research facility. This thesis is only tested on a limited basis on the availability of the grippers and CoBots in NTNU Manulab and spare kits of Sperre Industri As as the partner of this research with time constraints due to Covid19 pandemia. | |