The implementation of collaborative robots in production environments : a review of academic literature and industrial applications

Sammanfattning: The evolution of the global market that happened after the second world war has made competition between manufacturing companies much more difficult than before. In contrast to the days of Fordism, where mass production allowed companies to cut costs and have a profit margin through high productivity, flexibility is currently considered the key to surviving the competition and it require new production systems: information management systems and automated production systems that enable the expansion in product variety. The development of this new technologies is a real industrial revolution, and it is called industry 4.0. One core technology of Industry 4.0 are cobots, whose name comes from 'collaborative robot', precisely because the aim of this technology is to collaborate with the human worker to perform tasks. The main features that make cobots suited for production are flexibility and collaboration. The aim of this work is, through a review of academic literature and industrial applications, to understand the applications for which cobots are used and what benefits are obtained from the introduction of cobots within the company's production system. These collaborative robots can be easily moved and installed to perform new task. A benefit of using cobots is that they are more accurate than humans. In many applications human error is the cause of process deviation: an example is quality control, where the cobot can check the part with great repeatability; welding and gluing, where high accuracy is needed; they are also used for tasks that are considered unsafe or tedious for the human operator. Inserting a cobot in the production system of a company can generate great benefits, from the increase of productivity, the reduction of cycle time, and increase of quality of the products to the reduction of injuries for the human workers. However, the results of this thesis show that this technology is not fully mature, as the development of other complementary technologies including artificial intelligence, sensor-monitored environments and intelligent vision systems is necessary to use it in a proper collaborative way.