Safe human-machine centered design of an assembly station in a learning factory environment

Abstract

Learning factories allow both, students and professionals, to learn new approaches in production technology in practice. The transition from manual assembly to hybrid assembly towards an almost fully automated assembly can be arranged in learning factories in a practical way. Hybrid assembly specially shows a lot of potential, as it is designed to be adopted in situations with an increasing number of variants or customized products as well as the need for a scalable production system. In the modern view of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) in hybrid assembly systems, machines or robots are operating hand in hand with the human worker. This paper provides an approach to human-machine centered design of assembly systems and describes their implementation on a case study in the mini-factory laboratory of the Free University of Bolzano. The paper describes a case study, where a previously only manually produced product is produced in a hybrid assembly system i n combination with a lightweight robot. As part of the man-machine interaction this work analyses risks for the safety of the human worker and provides appropriate measures. The work finally concludes with a summary and an outlook for the future