European manufacturing companies are facing challenges of increasing prices of raw material, more customized products and competitiveness from industries outside Europe. Those challenges make the manufacturing require flexible production processes. The remanufacturing industry has the advantages of produce products using less raw material and to a lower cost compared with manufacturing. This makes the remanufacturing industry a way for the European companies to stay competitive. Challenges of the remanufacturing process are the operator exposure of vibrations, monotony tasks and ergonomic issues when disassembling the incoming core. To meet the challenges and stay competitive the Swedish manufacturing industries is currently examine the advantages of collaborative robots and how implementation of collaborative robots can improve production. Implementation of a collaborative robot at a workstation requires risk assessment as human safety is an important aspect to consider. Simulation modelling can advantageously be used to examine future state scenario or investigate how a current system is affected by different variables. To meet the challenges described the aim of this thesis has been to examine how to facilitate the design of a collaborative disassembly workstation by means of simulation. The work with the thesis is based on a case study made at a Swedish remanufacturing company. Following research questions has been formulated to fulfil the purpose: <li data-leveltext="-" data-font="Arial" data-listid="48" data-aria-posinset="0" data-aria-level="1">What are the challenges of verifying the operators´ safety by using simulation? <li data-leveltext="-" data-font="Arial" data-listid="48" data-aria-posinset="0" data-aria-level="1">What are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing a cobot in a disassembly station? <li data-leveltext="-" data-font="Arial" data-listid="48" data-aria-posinset="0" data-aria-level="1">How can simulation be used to facilitate decision making when developing a collaborative workstation? Results show simulation challenges as human’s movements, robot characteristics and the ability to simulate it, core condition uncertainty, software knowledge and time consuming simulation modeling. Human-robot collaboration enables to combine the characteristics of human flexibility and robot precision and repeatability. The robot can advantageously perform tasks which are detected as monotonous or not ergonomic to a human. Simulation can advantageously be used in an early stage of designing layout of a collaborative workstation for reachability verification.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mdh-44208 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Axelsson, Johanna |
| Publisher | Mälardalens högskola, Akademin för innovation, design och teknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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