Today’s business environment is dominated by change and uncertainty, and success within manufacturing is becoming more and more difficult to sustain. Also, many European manufacturing companies experience low availability of human resources and recruitment problems. One way to handle this challenge and improve a company’s efficiency could be to invest in automation and industrial robotics. However, robot automation investments are in many cases still too difficult and too technically advanced especially for small and medium sized enterprises. There is need for automated systems with an acceptable investment, high efficiency, high adaptability, and with such flexibility that it may produce several different products and adapt to future product variants without large additional investments. Thus, the concepts of flexibility and reconfigurability are becoming increasingly important within manufacturing systems and robotic work stations. The objective of this paper is to investigate the need for flexible and reconfigurable industrial robot systems and to present some possible solutions for how the concept of mobile industrial robotics can be applied within industry, and specifically at small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). A conceptual solution for a mobile industrial robot will be presented and evaluated in terms of applicability for a manufacturing SME. The result of this evaluation is that the concept of mobile industrial robotics may be an enabler for SMEs to overcome the barrier to invest in industrial robotics. However, several technical developments have to be accomplished to open up the market for this type of solutions, and the common attitude of the SME would have to be changed to become more receptive to this type of highly technological solution, i.e. the perceived complexity of the highly complex system has to be low.
Globalization, demographic changes, and environmental challenges put a strong pressure on European manufacturing industry and increase demands on resource efficiency, sustainable manufacturing, innovative products and individualized products. Today, Swedish manufacturing in mature traditional sectors is increasingly migrating to low-wage countries such as China and India. There is a strong need for the manufacturing industry in Sweden to enhance the ability to develop and manufacture products competitively. One way could be through an increased level of automation and increased use of industrial robotics. However, robot automation investments are in many cases, regarded as too expensive and too technically advanced, especially within small and medium sized enterprises. The objective of this paper is to investigate requirements as well as possible solutions for efficient use of robot automation in the Swedish manufacturing industry. Results from two research projects are presented. In the first project, requirements on automation solutions within small and medium sized manufacturing companies have been analyzed. The second project has investigated and developed possible solutions for increased reconfigurability of robotic systems enabling production of different products and simple configuration to handle future product variants without large additional investments.
The construction industry is today among the least automated industries with a long tradition of utilizing manual labour. Despite the potential benefits of automation, only a few examples of using robots to automate (parts of) construction have been presented over the past years. In this paper we present our ongoing work towards automated installation of reinforcement, a traditionally very heavy and labour intensive work. We use industrial robots and we discuss the potential benefits and challenges of such robotic automation in construction. Our overall goal is to achieve a fully automated robotic solution for flexible serial production of custom made non-identical reinforcement cages. In the paper we highlight and analyse the main challenges that must be addressed in order to reach a functioning and efficient solution.