This research presents a novel design metric based on maximum power flux density for the assessment of the severity of a transient physical contact between a robot manipulator and a human body region. Such incidental transient contact can occur in the course of a collaborative application of the power- and force-limiting type. The proposed metric is intended for the design and development of the robot manipulator as well as for the design of manufacturing applications. Such safety metric can also aid in controlling the robot’s speeds during manufacturing operations by carrying out rapid risk assessments of impending collisions that could arise due to the proximity to the human co-worker. Furthermore, this study contributes by expressing the physical impact between the robot and the human body region as a linear spring-damper model. The influence of the restitution coefficient and the elasticity of the human tissues on the contact duration and contact area during the collision is analysed. With the demonstrated analysis model, the dependence of the power flux density with respect to the robot’s effective mass, speed, and geometrical and damping coefficients during the human-industrial robot manipulator collision process is investigated.
There is a strong interest in the scope of human-industrial robot collaboration (HIRC) in manufacturing industry for greater flexibility and productivity. However, HIRC in manufacturing is still in its infancy; industrial practitioners have many apprehensions and uncertainties concerning the system's performance and human operators' safety. Therefore, there is a need for investigations into design processes and methods to make sure the designed HIRC workstations successfully meet design guidelines on system performance, human safety and ergonomics for practical industrial applications. This research proposes a HIRC workstation design process. The novelty of this design process is the methodology to evaluate the HIRC workstation design alternatives by considering both performance and safety characteristics through computer-based simulations. As a proof of concept, the proposed HIRC design process is applied on an industrial manufacturing case from a heavy-vehicle manufacturing company.
Intricate and complex dependencies between multiple disciplines require iterative intensive optimization processes. To this end, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) has been established as a convincing concurrent technique to manage inherited complexities.
This paper presents a high level CAD and CAE design automation methodology which enables fast, efficient concept generation for MDO. To increase the evaluation speed, global metamodels are introduced to replace computationally expensive CAD and CAE models. In addition, various techniques are applied to drastically decrease the number of samplings required to create the metamodels. In the final part of the paper, a multi-level optimization strategy is proposed to find the optimal concept.
As proof of concept, a real world design problem, from ABB industrial robotics, is presented.
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