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Highly Customizable and Flexible Packaging Station for mid- to upper sized Electronic Consumer Goods using Industrial Robots

Project description


Smart Factories: ICT for agile and environmentally friendly manufacturing
Packaging workstation with teachable system architecture
Electronic consumer goods have a large number of variants and are packaged manually. Automating the packaging process will decrease the production cycle time and costs also for mixed variant production lines, thus allowing that several production lines can be merged to a reduced number of packaging stations. CustomPacker aims at developing and integrating a scalable and flexible packaging assistant that aids human workers while packaging mid to upper sized and mostly heavy goods.
The main goal is to design and assemble a packaging workstation mostly using standard hardware components resulting in a universal handling system for different products.

The project entitled Highly Customizable and Flexible Packaging Station for mid- to upper sized Electronic Consumer Goods using Industrial Robots (CustomPacker) aims at developing and integrating a scalable and flexible packaging assistant that aids human workers while packaging mid to upper sized and mostly heavy goods.Electronic consumer goods, e.g. TV sets, have a large number of variants and are packaged manually. Only in single-variant production lines with high lot sizes, an automation of the packaging step has been introduced. However, automating the packaging process will decrease the production cycle time and costs also for mixed variant production lines, thus allowing that several production lines can be merged to a reduced number of flexible packaging stations. This also allows an optimization with regard to the actual demands of the (various) goods (i.e. number of items produced per day). In order to achieve the realization of these challenging goals for a highly flexible packaging station, CustomPacker will bring together the highly adaptable skills of a human worker together with the precision and ability of robots to carry heavy goods.The main goal of CustomPacker is to design and assemble a packaging workstation mostly using standard hardware components resulting in a universal handling system for different products. Ideally one setup for packaging a high variety of products and components can be implemented, which can be achieved by a teachable system architecture. This will open a new dimension of today's way in how industrial robots are deployed, namely the collaboration of human workers together with robot co-workers. Only by driving the reliability and precision of today's available technology to the limits and by additionally forcing the use of highly sophisticated software modules for worker detection and intention recognition, the cycle times can be reduced in order to justify the investment costs for additional complexity.

Call for proposal

FP7-2010-NMP-ICT-FoF
See other projects for this call

Coordinator Contact

Frank WALLHOFF Prof.Dr.

Coordinator

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN
EU contribution
€ 710 741,00
Address
Arcisstrasse 21
80333 Muenchen
Germany

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Region
Bayern Oberbayern München, Kreisfreie Stadt
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Administrative Contact
Ulrike Ronchetti (Ms.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (6)