Wire Harness Assembly Process Supported by a Collaborative Robot: A Case Study Focus on Ergonomics
Journal article, 2022

Products and assets are becoming increasingly “smart”, e.g., mechatronic, electronic, or cyber-physical. In the lack of fully reliable wireless solutions, extensive wiring and wire bundling into wire harnesses are needed. This has manufacturing implications, leading to increasingly complex wire harness assembly processes, where numerous components, connectors, and cables are assembled, connecting critical and non-critical electric and electronic systems in smart products and assets. Thus, wire harnesses demand is rapidly rising in most industries, requiring human or robotic work. Often, required work tasks are repetitive and physically demanding, while still needing people for quality reasons. An attractive solution would therefore be humans collaborating with robots. Unfortunately, there are very few scientific studies on automation solutions using collaborative robots (cobots) for wire harness assembly process tasks to increase process productivity and improve work ergonomics. Furthermore, wire harness assembly process tasks are presently carried out 90% manually in this industry, causing serious ergonomic problems for assembly workers who perform such tasks daily. The challenge is reducing the ergonomic risks currently present in many established wire harness assembly processes while improving production time and quality. This paper presents an early prototype and simulation to integrate a cobot into a wire harness assembly process, primarily for work ergonomic improvements. The use of a cobot is specifically proposed to reduce ergonomic risks for wire harness assembly workers. Two methodologies: RULA and JSI were used to evaluate the ergonomics of the task of cable tie collocation. The real-world case study results illustrate the validation of a cobot which significantly reduced non-ergonomic postures in the task of placing cable ties in the wire harnesses assembly process studied. An ergonomic analysis without the cobot (the actual process) was conducted, based on RULA and JSI methodologies, presenting the highest possible scores in both evaluations, which calls for urgent changes in the current wire harness assembly process task studied. Then, the same analysis was performed with the cobot, obtaining significant reductions in the ergonomic risks of the task at hand to acceptable values.

collaborative robots

assembly

wire harness

ergonomics

computer vision systems

Author

Gabriel E. Navas-Reascos

Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education

David Romero

Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education

Ciro A. Rodriguez

Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education

Federico Guedea

Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education

Johan Stahre

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Production Systems

Robotics

22186581 (eISSN)

Vol. 11 6 131

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

Other Engineering and Technologies not elsewhere specified

Reliability and Maintenance

Areas of Advance

Production

DOI

10.3390/robotics11060131

More information

Latest update

1/5/2023 1