Technical Maturity for Industrial Deployment of Robot Demonstrators

Any technical development done in the context of agile manufacturing has limited benefit if it's not industrially utilized. This requires maturing the developed technologies to a point that they are robust enough to provide a productivity boost, while at the same time adhering to the relevant industrial standards. In this paper we present the various stages in which different robot demonstrators were able to achieve the required technical maturity for industrial deployment. We present the context about the importance of developing technologies that facilitate agile manufacturing followed by the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice, due to which many promising technologies do not end up being deployed in the industry as they were not subjected to maturity actions required for the transition. We present the journey of four industrial demonstrators that bridged this gap. Furthermore, we provide the assessment methods to ascertain the iterative developmental steps, and present a generic approach to improve the technological readiness.