An approach to evaluate the impact of the introduction of a disassembly line in traditional manufacturing systems

Purpose: The circular economy (CE) paradigm, traditionally based on the 3R (reuse, recycle, and remanufacture) principles, provides benefits for sustainability and represents a big opportunity for manufacturing enterprises to reduce costs and take economic advantages. This paper proposes an approach that can help stakeholders transition towards CE oriented business by evaluating the economic convenience of introducing a manual disassembly line to recover the components of End-of-Life (EoL) products in a traditional manufacturing system. Design/methodology/approach: The conceptual approach is generic and based on the characteristics of EoL products and on the reusability and recyclability features of every component. Then, based on the type of product and the disassembly sequence, the disassembly line is built in the virtual environment along the assembly line. The virtual environment must take into account the probabilistic parameters that characterise each real industrial context. Therefore, the assembly-disassembly lines are linked with the variables and economic functions needed to process the outputs of the approach application. Findings: Implemented in a virtual environment, the proposed approach evaluates a priori possible economic and environmental benefits coming from the integration of a disassembly line within a manufacturing context. The approach considers the variability of the EoL products’ status (their reusability and recyclability indices), provides the optimal number of operators that must be assigned to the manual disassembly line and determines the maximum reduction of the product cost that can be gained by introducing the disassembly line. Furthermore, an application example is provided to show the potential of the tool. Originality/value: Recently, the scientific literature has dealt with the issue related to the disassembly process of EoL products from several perspectives (e.g. disassembly line scheduling, planning, balancing, with and without the consideration of the quality of EoL products). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study provided an approach to evaluate the convenience of the investment in a disassembly line. Therefore, this document contributes to this research field by proposing a simple approach that supports the decision-making process of traditional manufacturing enterprises to evaluate a priori the economic return (i.e. how much the product cost decreases) and provide an estimate of the environmental benefits of integrating a manual disassembly line of EoL products with a traditional manufacturing systemPeer Reviewe

A human-oriented design process for collaborative robotics

The potential of collaborative robotics often does not materialize in an efficient design of the human-robot collaboration. Technology-oriented approaches are no longer enough in the Industry 4.0 era. This work proposes a set of methods to support manufacturing engineers in the human-oriented design process of integrated production systems to obtain satisfactory performance in the mass customization paradigm, without impacting the safety and health of workers. It founds the design criteria definition on five main pillars (safety, ergonomics, effectiveness, flexibility, and costs), favors the consideration of different design alternatives, and leads their selection. The dynamic impact of the design choices on the various elements of the system prevails over the static design constraints. The method has been experimented in collaboration with the major kitchen manufacturer in Italy, which introduced a collaborative robotics cell in the drawers' assembly line. It resulted in a more balanced production line (10% more), a verified risk minimization (RULA score reduced from 5 to 3 and OCRA score from 13.30 to 5.70), and a greater allocation of operators to high added value activities

Parallel Manipulators

In recent years, parallel kinematics mechanisms have attracted a lot of attention from the academic and industrial communities due to potential applications not only as robot manipulators but also as machine tools. Generally, the criteria used to compare the performance of traditional serial robots and parallel robots are the workspace, the ratio between the payload and the robot mass, accuracy, and dynamic behaviour. In addition to the reduced coupling effect between joints, parallel robots bring the benefits of much higher payload-robot mass ratios, superior accuracy and greater stiffness; qualities which lead to better dynamic performance. The main drawback with parallel robots is the relatively small workspace. A great deal of research on parallel robots has been carried out worldwide, and a large number of parallel mechanism systems have been built for various applications, such as remote handling, machine tools, medical robots, simulators, micro-robots, and humanoid robots. This book opens a window to exceptional research and development work on parallel mechanisms contributed by authors from around the world. Through this window the reader can get a good view of current parallel robot research and applications

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 324)

This bibliography lists 200 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during May, 1989. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

Task Oriented Programming and Service Algorithms for Smart Robotic Cells

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

On adaptive robot systems for manufacturing applications

System adaptability is very important to current manufacturing practices due to frequent changes in the customer needs. Two basic concepts that can be employed to achieve system adaptability are flexible systems and modular systems. Flexible systems are fixed integral systems with some adjustable components. Adjustable components have limited ranges of parameter changes that can be made, thus restricting the adaptability of systems. Modular systems are composed of a set of pre-existing modules. Usually, the parameters of modules in modular systems are fixed, and thus increased system adaptability is realized only by increasing the number of modules. Increasing the number of modules could result in higher costs, poor positioning accuracy, and low system stiffness in the context of manufacturing applications. In this thesis, a new idea was formulated: a combination of the flexible system and modular system concepts. Systems developed based on this new idea are called adaptive systems. This thesis is focused on adaptive robot systems. An adaptive robot system is such that adaptive components or adjustable parameters are introduced upon the modular architecture of a robot system. This implies that there are two levels to achieve system adaptability: the level where a set of modules is appropriately assembled and the level where adjustable components or parameters are specified. Four main contributions were developed in this thesis study. First, a General Architecture of Modular Robots (GAMR) was developed. The starting point was to define the architecture of adaptive robot systems to have as many configuration variations as possible. A novel application of the Axiomatic Design Theory (ADT) was applied to GAMR development. It was found that GAMR was the one with the most coverage, and with a judicious definition of adjustable parameters. Second, a system called Automatic Kinematic and Dynamic Analysis (AKDA) was developed. This system was a foundation for synthesis of adaptive robot configurations. In comparison with the existing approach, the proposed approach has achieved systemization, generality, flexibility, and completeness. Third, this thesis research has developed a finding that in modular system design, simultaneous consideration of both kinematic and dynamic behaviors is a necessary step, owing to a strong coupling between design variables and system behaviors. Based on this finding, a method for simultaneous consideration of type synthesis, number synthesis, and dimension synthesis was developed. Fourth, an adaptive modular Parallel Kinematic Machine (PKM) was developed to demonstrate the benefits of adaptive robot systems in parallel kinematic machines, which have found many applications in machine tool industries. In this architecture, actuators and limbs were modularized, while the platforms were adjustable in such a way that both the joint positions and orientations on the platforms can be changed