Towards performance analysis of wheel loading process in automotive manufacturing

In our previous work, we developed an automated wheel loading system for the trim-and-final assembly in automotive manufacturing. Since the actual system is difficult to set up to evaluate the performance of a wheel loading system, a simulation package should be available to estimate the performance of the system with a chosen robot. This paper presents a method to analyze the performance of a wheel loading process using an industrial robot. The force control and visual servoing loops are analyzed to estimate the assembly time and tracking errors. The simulation results of the wheel loading system are verified using experimental results. The comparison indicates that the developed method can be used to estimate the performance of the wheel loading process. Our future work will be focused on validating the developed method using different robotic systems.