A Smart Work Cell to Reduce Adoption Barriers of Collaborative Robotics

Investment costs and lack of knowledge are often cited as barriers to adopting collaborative robots, especially for smaller businesses with limited budgets. Cobots demand specialised knowledge and skills not only for their installation and programming but also for effectively maintaining and adapting them to accommodate various product types. This paper presents a smart work cell solution using a collaborative robot to meet production requirements while overcoming the obstacles associated with small batch sizes and a wide range of product types. The solution provides simple and guided procedures for quick parameterization and setup, targeting non-expert users. A SME producing hand tweezers has applied and tested the proposed solution. The work also demonstrates the applicability of collaborative robots to high-dexterity tasks such as belt grinding and polishing.