From Design for Assembly to Design for Collaborative Assembly - Product Design Principles for Enhancing Safety, Ergonomics and Efficiency in Human-Robot Collaboration

Over the past decades, product design has been very much concerned with the topics of Design for Manufacturing and Design for Assembly. The aim was to design products in such a way that they could be manufactured easily and cost-effectively using existing production processes. In consequence of the introduction of Industry 4.0 and collaborative robotics in production, production system and process designers are facing new challenges in designing safe, ergonomic and efficient assembly processes. Cost-effective collaborative robots enable the automation of production processes even with small quantities and are therefore now of great interest also for small and medium-sized companies. In this work, we present the hypothesis, that in addition to manufacturing system design, a corresponding product design can also positively or negatively influence the feasibility of collaborative assembly and workcells. Based on the aforementioned “Design for X” methods many product designers already have certain traditional assembly technologies in mind. However, if these assembly technologies are to be substituted by more innovative approaches to assemble products using human-robot collaboration, this often leads to product design being not or only conditionally suitable for collaborative assembly. In this work we show what kind of changes occur in assembly due to the introduction of collaborative robotics and what influence product design has on these changes. As a result of this research, we present design principles and design guidelines for products to enhance safety, ergonomics and efficiency in collaborative assembly