Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The production of small batch sizes tends to be highly labor-intensive and in high-wage countries results in significant costs for small and medium sized enterprises, dramatically affecting their competitiveness. While complete automation is an obvious solution for mass production, the setup of such automation systems tends to be overly complex and cost-prohibitive for production processes of small batch sizes. Indeed, the setup, handling and maintenance of the automation system then becomes challenging and may annihilate any economic gain resulting for the automation of the process. The applies to the welding process, widely used in many small and medium enterprises. Hence a semi-automated system might optimal compromise. Novarc Technologies recently developed a collaborative welding robot that assists workers in performing the welding task by physically interacting with them in the same workplace. Not aiming at a replacement but rather supporting the worker the collaborative robot (cobot) allows a junior worker to perform tasks that usually are done by highly skilled welders. Furthermore, a lower-skilled welder's throughput might be increased resulting in increased productivity. The goal of this project, under the auspices of the Canada - Germany 2+2 programme is the development of an intelligent, highly adaptive, agile control system for a cooperative welding robot for small batches. The system is to be implemented on Novarc Technologies' collaborative welding robot in collaboration with Fraunhofer Institute for Mechatronic Systems Design IEM (IEM) and to be tested at Moderne Industrie Technik GmbH & Co. KG (MIT).