Human-Robot Collaboration for Composite Production

Particularly small and medium-sized companies manufacture the majority of their composite components by manual processes. In this way, they achieve the maximum possible flexibility to react quickly to changes in the market, as well as a wide range of reproducible component geometries and complexities. This is enabled by the great wealth of experience of the employees, who have a profound understanding of the limp textile materials and can therefore adapt quickly to new conditions. However, the achievable production speed through manual production techniques reduces productivity. In addition, new employees must undergo extensive training of up to two years in order to autonomously produce a component in the required quality and to develop the necessary understanding of the material. Trained employees are rare and are usually headhunted by large companies in the aviation or automotive industry.
For these reasons, it is necessary to empower companies producing composites to automate their processes with a high degree of flexibility. It is essential to maintain the great expertise of the employees, i.e. not to replace it with automation and thus to ensure high component complexity and quality. Therefore, an innovative workspace for the semi-automated composite production is being developed at Institut für Textiltechnik (ITA) of RWTH Aachen University. It is based on the flexible collaboration of human workers and robots. In this manner, it is possible to investigate how training times of both humans and robots can be reduced and how productivity of manual composite production can be increased.

Video: Tobias König
Music: Niklas Dammers