Inline Process Control – a concept study of efficient in-line process control and process adjustment with respect to product geometry

• All manufacturing processes have variation which may violate the fulfillment of assembly, functional, geometrical or esthetical requirements and difficulties to reach desired form in all areas. The cost for geometry defects rises downstream in the process chain. Therefore, it is vital to discover these defects as soon as they appear. Then adjustments can be done in the process without losing products or time. In order to find a solution for this, a project with the overall scope “development of an intelligent process control system” has been initiated. This project consists of five different work packages: Inline measurement, Process Evaluation, Corrective actions, Flexible tooling and demonstrator cell. These work packages address different areas which are necessary to fulfill the overall scope of the project. The system shall both be able to detect geometrical defects, propose adjustments and adjust simple process parameters. The results are demonstrated in a demo cell located at Chalmers University of Technology. In the demonstrator all the different areas have been verified in an industrial case study – assembly of GOR Volvo S80. Efficient offline programming for robot based measurement, efficient process evaluation based on case base reasoning (CBR) methodology, flexible fixtures and process adjustments based on corrective actions regarding in going part positioning.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Smart assembly

digital plant

geometry variation

Off-line programming

path planning

flexible fixturing

case base reasoning

process analysis

geometry verification

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)