Industrial Challenges when Planning and Preparing Collaborative and Intelligent Automation Systems for Final Assembly Stations

Paper in proceeding, 2019

During the last five decades, automation and robotics have transformed the automotive industry by increasing efficiency and improving the product quality. However, future trucks that will be autonomous, electrical and connected will require a completely new type of flexibility and intelligence in the production systems, especially in the final assembly. To handle the increased complexity of the products, production processes and logistic systems, final assembly must be transformed into collaborative and intelligent automation systems. These systems will include collaborative and deliberative robots (cobots), advanced vision-based control, adaptive safety systems, online optimization and learning algorithms and connected and well-informed human operators. But it will be a huge undertaking to transform current trucks industry such that they can design, implement and maintain large scale collaborative and intelligent automation systems. This paper presents the challenges with current planning and preparation processes for final assembly as well as the requirement and possible solutions for the future processes. An industrial use case at Volvo Trucks based on Sequence Planner and ROS2 is used to evaluate the proposed planning and preparation processes.