Flexible Collaboration @ Thomas Regout International (TRI)


Flexible collaboration of human workers with mobile robots and augmented reality to accelerate manual tasks, without the need of previous experience

Description:

Support the business strategy of TRI by increasing flexibility on the shop floor and reducing production costs.

Challenge

Overall: visual management shop floor, MES is not enough

P1: replacing Pick & Place unit by a Smart Robot without fences

P2: replacing human labour by robotic agents to eliminate heavy load on human beings,

P3: Reduce high dependency on experience of tool preparation by introducing Augmented Reality

Solution:

– Augmented Reality assistance to accelerate the assembling of production tools without the need for experience,

– Monitoring and orchestration of automated and manual tasks by the HORSE MPMS to enable flexible and effective production,

– Automated stacking and un-stacking of parts in boxes, and transfer of the boxes between the lines by AGV, encompassing the integration of robots of different vendors.

Components used in the use case

Implementation time: 18 months

Implementation cost: N.A.

Outputs:

– Reduced change-overs, and change-over time,

– Efficient management of production,

– Reduced workload on humans and no need for previous experience,

– Integration and management of heterogeneous robots under a common platform

Impact:

Main Sector of Application: production and design of customized telescopic slides for several industrial equipment applications.

Potential Sector/s of Application: This use case of HORSE offers scalability potential for other production lines with small lot sizes and frequent changeovers. Tested with a huge industrial group, the results can be transferred to SMEs which are normally confronted with exactly these challenges.

This is a pilot undertaken under the Horse project. (See this pilot in project’s site)



Project:

Enterprises:
Horse Consortium ‘

Sector
Metal

Keywords