Development of Single-Arm Robots for Automotive Body Assembly Automation

This paper presents an automotive body assembly line prototype with the single-arm robot. The aim is to develop how the single-arm robot can work automatically in the automotive assembly automation by the programmable logic control (PLC). There are two modes of assembly line prototype as manual and automatic modes. Proposed automotive body assembly automation consists of four main systems as the main controller by PLC MITSUBISHI, a set of single-arm robots named ‘DOBOT’, three sets of conveyors and the pneumatics systems. DobotStudio software is used to control the arms. For the colour object detection, the NPN-photosensor is used with the different range and position. For the demonstration, the car door assembly part is used to test. For the colour detection, the maximum range is of 15 cm and the average distance of NPN-photosensor is approximately 12.157 cm for indoor. The experimental results show that the automatic assembly line production can operate precisely in both manual and automatic modes.