EWASS Empowering Human Workers for Assembly of Wire Harnesses

Research Project, 2022 – 2025

Purpose and goal
The project´s goal is to assist the industry in ensuring a sustainable work-life by empowering human workers during assembly of wire harnesses. The objective is to improve productivity, quality, and ergonomics of assembly installation of wire harnesses and high voltage cables using collaborative robots, thereby boosting the manufacturing of electrified vehicles. This will be achieved not only by proposing novel HRC technology, but also by providing new simulation tools that augment manufacturing engineers’ abilities to improve work station designs.

Expected results and effects
Objectives include: (WP2) a wire harness software demonstrator; (WP3) a physical Human robot Collaboration (HRC) system including methods and guidelines for collaborative wire harness assembly; (WP4) increased safety and smoothness of HRC by anticipating the actions of the human workers; and (WP5) physical and virtual demonstrator at Scania and virtual demonstrator at ASSAR to develop, test, and show increased smoothness of HRC, and physical and virtual demonstrator at SII-Lab, pilot plants at AB Volvo and Volvo Cars.

Planned approach and implementation
Industrial partners will be responsible for coordination and demonstrators. FCC will cooperate with HiS on ergonomics and with CEVT and Scania to ensure industrial requirements. Chalmers and HiS will collaborate to create an HRC system. AB Volvo, VCC and Wiretronic will provide wire harnesses and expert knowledge. The project results are evaluated at Scania for safety aspects, at ASSAR for smoothness of HRC, and at Chalmers for the collaborative wire harness assembly. AB Volvo and VCC will be used to bring the results for testing in an as realistic environment as possible.