Collaborative and robot-based plug & produce for rapid reconfiguration of modular production systems

The manufacturing of individualized products down to batch size 1 poses ongoing challenges for the design and integration of future production systems. Today's production lines with a high degree of automation achieve high efficiency, but usually come with high costs for adaptation to product variants. In order to combine full automation with high flexibility, we propose a concept for the dynamic composition of automation components in a modular production system that facilitates the rapid adaptation of collaborative and robot-supported manufacturing processes. To achieve this, we integrate self-descriptive automation components at runtime into the control architecture of the production system using a Plug-and-Produce approach. While the location and orientation of automation components in the modular production system are derived from physical human-robot interaction, the adaptation and verification of the robot behavior is made possible through a simulation-based planning subsystem. Once this dynamic reconfiguration process by the machine setter is finished, the adapted production process is executed in a fully automated way with high efficiency. A case study carried out in an industrial collaboration project on flexible assembly demonstrates the benefits of the presented approach.