Robots as enablers for changeability in assembly applications

After giving an introduction into the basic concepts of changeability and recent developments in industrial robotics, the paper analyses the requirements for change-enabling robot systems based on three transformation scenarios: lot size change, product geometry change and process change. As a result, change-enabling robot systems that can cope with the mentioned transformation scenarios must support integration into manual work stations and must be highly modular to allow adaptation of hardware and software with little effort. The remaining paper describes a door module assembly use case, develops a concept of a change-enabling robot system for this use case and evaluates the robot system applied to this use case with regard to cycle time, costs and the three transformation scenarios.