Sustainable human-robot co-production for the bicycle industry

Journal article (2021)

Authors

D. Aschenbrenner Mechatronic Design - IDE , Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule
Åsa Fasth Berglund Chalmers University of Technology
M.P. Netten Delft Design Innovation & Impact
Johan Stahre Chalmers University of Technology
Research Group
Mechatronic Design (IDE) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2021 D. Aschenbrenner, Åsa Fasth Berglund, M.P. Netten, Z. Rusak, Johan Stahre
DOI
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2021.11.144
Assembly Manufacturing Industry 4.0 Bicycles Automation analysis Cobots
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Published Date

2021

Language

English

Faculty

Industrial Design Engineering

Department

Sustainable Design Engineering

Research Group

Mechatronic Design

Abstract

Bicycle production has not changed much over the last 100 years, it is still performed mainly by manual labor in mass production. During the global pandemic, the demand for ecologically friendly and customized transport has increased. Hence, customers start to impose the same requirements on bikes as on cars: they want more customized products and short delivery time. This publication describes an approach to transform bicycle manufacturing towards human-robot co-production to enable smaller batch sizes and production on-shoring. We list the challenges of this transformation, our applied methods, and presents preliminary results of the cobot-driven prototypes.