Robotics for SME's – Investigating a Mobile, Flexible, and Reconfigurable Robot Solution

摘要

Today's business environment is dominated by changernand uncertainty, and success within manufacturing isrnbecoming more and more difficult to sustain. Also, manyrnEuropean manufacturing companies experience lowrnavailability of human resources and recruitment problems.rnOne way to handle this challenge and improve a company'srnefficiency could be to invest in automation and industrialrnrobotics. However, robot automation investments are inrnmany cases still too difficult and too technically advancedrnespecially for small and medium sized enterprises. There isrnneed for automated systems with an acceptable investment,rnhigh efficiency, high adaptability, and with such flexibilityrnthat it may produce several different products and adapt tornfuture product variants without large additional investments.rnThus, the concepts of flexibility and reconfigurability arernbecoming increasingly important within manufacturingrnsystems and robotic work stations.rnThe objective of this paper is to investigate the need forrnflexible and reconfigurable industrial robot systems and tornpresent some possible solutions for how the concept ofrnmobile industrial robotics can be applied within industry,rnand specifically at small and medium sized enterprisesrn(SMEs). A conceptual solution for a mobile industrial robotrnwill be presented and evaluated in terms of applicability forrna manufacturing SME. The result of this evaluation is thatrnthe concept of mobile industrial robotics may be an enablerrnfor SMEs to overcome the barrier to invest in industrialrnrobotics. However, several technical developments have tornbe accomplished to open up the market for this type ofrnsolutions, and the common attitude of the SME would havernto be changed to become more receptive to this type ofrnhighly technological solution, i.e. the perceived complexityrnof the highly complex system has to be low.