Autonomous assembly and disassembly by cognition using hybrid assembly cells

Current political, economic, and ecological developments put severe pressure on European industries. Significant value chains depend uniliterally on single suppliers for many industrial resources including, raw materials, semi-finished goods as well as whole components. At the very same time, the European industry needs to get carbon neutral within an unprecedented short time frame. To address these challenges, flexibility, adaptivity[...], and resilience based on adaptive assembly and disassembly systems acting autonomously are key. Existing systems lack crucial capabilities as they focus on output volumes and economic criteria excluding part variance. Furthermore, these systems are unsuitable for small and medium batches due to the necessary investment. The paper presents a novel concept for hybrid-autonomous assembly and disassembly systems based on robot cells added to manual stations. A batch-individual allocation of sub-tasks to the autonomous robot-based system and the manual assembly on-site will lead to maximum flexibility while utilising the advantages of both.