A novel concept of agile assembly machine for sets applied in the automotive industry

A Novel Automated System for the Handling of Car Seat Wires on Plastic Over-Injection Molding Machines

“…Indeed, similar developments have been made by other authors, namely, Costa et al [2], who designed a novel machine based on conventional automation, eliminating persistent quality problems, or Nunes et al [7] who designed a novel assembly system based on conventional automation and able to eliminate human labor assembly operations, increasing productivity as well. Moreover, Costa et al [9] developed novel equipment to assemble complex automotive parts based only on conventional automation and artificial vision for quality control and achieving significant improvements in production rate and repeatability, or even the upgrade carried out by Santos et al [21] who improved equipment for the production of components for tire manufacturing based solely on conventional automation, significantly reducing the downtime of this type of equipment and increasing the OEE (overall equipment efficiency). These works, as well as others presented in the Introduction and Background of this article [6,22,23,43], refer to the outline of production systems that ensure increased production efficiency, as well as drastically superior reliability, requiring relatively low investment.…”

“…Flexible automation is used for families of similar products, where a relatively short setup allows a switch from one product to another within the same family. Programmable automation is the most advanced and also the most flexible, but also the most expensive to implement, and the one that best integrates the principles of smart manufacturing [7][8][9]. In the last few decades, research has been focused mainly on flexible and programmable automation, but there have also been studies in fixed automation [2,[6][7][8][9].…”

“…Moreira et al [8] developed a flexible system for the assembly of several types of Bowden cables of the same family, allowing the manufacturing cycle time to be shortened, but mainly eliminating the intermediate stocks existing between the different operations. Costa et al [9], based on a product identical to that used in the work of Nunes et al [7], developed competently automated and programmable equipment, which allowed the feeding of components, their assembly in jigs suitable for each product of the same family, and the assembly and control through a very innovative concept, practically without any human intervention. Santos et al [21] used state-of-the-art automated systems to upgrade equipment to produce vehicle tire components, greatly increasing the accuracy of the equipment, improving the final product quality, but essentially drastically reducing downtime due to breakdown of the equipment (−62%).…”

A novel concept of a conduit transport system

“…In addition, operators have been spared the task of a low-value, error-prone task that causes fatigue and occupational diseases. Costa et al [14], based on identical parts to the study presented in [13], with the same function but now in polymeric materials, has designed a completely different concept, extremely agile, which allows adapting to a wide family of parts, with very short setup time. This equipment only required the discharge of components in the equipment and the loading of parts already assembled, and the system is also able to control and separate the OK parts of the NOK ones.…”

“…Unlike other works such as [9,12,13,14], this work did not aim at reducing cycle time in order to increase productivity, but rather a transport systems simplification of the main by-product along the equipment, where it will undergo several manufacturing operations. However, it can be considered that this work is in line with [16], because the main causes of equipment's breakdowns have been eliminated, being expected a reduction of about 70% regarding the breakdowns history of the first version of the equipment, being also notorious the reduction of the setup time, as in [11], which will be reduced from about 5 hours to 10 minutes regarding the reduction of tasks needed and the simplicity included in the new design taking into account the setup operations, that is, a reduction of about 97%.…”