Great success of ReconCell Workshop at European Robotics Forum 2016

ReconCell’s workshop “Efficient robot programming, force control and passive reconfiguration technologies for fast set-up of robotic workcells” was a great success at ERF 2016. The goal of this workshop is to find out how technologies such as efficient robot programming, sensing, and passively reconfigurable elements can contribute to faster set-up times of robotic workcells.

Rapid changes in market demands lead to decreasing product life cycle times and also more frequent products launches. An enterprise has to react fast, efficiently, and in an economically justified way to market changes. More frequent changeovers in product type or in a number of products require new engineering and production methodologies and machinery equipment to enable shorter set-up times of production environments.

Robots as highly flexible devices have been successfully utilized in many industrial production processes. However, companies are still reluctant to employ robots for many types of tasks. The main hindrances are complexities involved in setting-up robot–based automated solutions because these usually require expert knowledge and also significant time for testing and fine-tuning. Looking at robotic systems in more detail, we can recognise that these problems are due to the long time needed to re-configure and re-programme the robot workcell for a new production task.

The results of the workshop will elucidate what kind of technologies are needed to shorten set-up times of robotic workcells and where more research is needed in the future. Participants are asked to prepare one success story related to shortening of set-up times in automated robot production in order to facilitate a round table discussion.