Evolution of flexible industrial assembly

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of industrial assembly, highlighting current challenges and opportunities with emerging smart manufacturing technologies like collaborative robots and digital twins for future flexible assembly systems.

Contribution

It proposes a generic framework and basic building blocks for developing future collaborative assembly cells, integrating new technologies and addressing existing gaps.

Findings

Assembly has evolved from craftsmanship to flexible cells.

Emerging technologies enable higher automation and flexibility.

A framework for future collaborative assembly systems is proposed.

Abstract

Assembly is a key industrial process to achieve finished goods. Driven by market demographics and technological advancements, industrial assembly has evolved through several phases i.e. craftmanship, bench assembly, assembly lines and flexible assembly cells. Due to the complexity and variety of assembly tasks, besides significant advancement of automation technologies in other manufacturing activities, humans are still considered vital for assembly operations. The rationalization of manufacturing automation has considerably remained away from assembly systems. The advancement in assembly has only been in terms of better scheduling of work tasks and avoiding of wastes. With smart manufacturing technologies such as collaborative robots, additive manufacturing, and digital twins, the opportunities have arisen for the next reshaping of assembly systems. The new paradigm promises a higher degree of automation yet remaining flexible. This may result into a new manufacturing paradigm driven by the advancement of new technologies, new customer expectations and by establishing new kinds of manufacturing systems. This study explores the future collaborative assembly cells, presents a generic framework to develop them and the basic building blocks.