Beschreibung
The development of industrial production is subject to a change, which is mainly caused by higher customer orientation. The possibility of an end-customer to configure nearly individual mass products results in sophisticated challenges for production. The diversity of variants is growing. In addition an increasing demand to offer a band of new products leads to shorter product life cycles. To be competitive a company has to provide the product at reasonable costs. Considering serial production lines in highly developed countries, a high degree of automation is necessary to gain economies of scale. These changes of the economic boundaries demand specific design methodologies for the production equipment. In particular reconfigurable robotic systems are promising alternatives to the purchase of new production equipment. In case of changed production organization, reconfigurable robotic systems reduce redesign efforts and do not require rescheduling of entire production lines. Major impact factors to the design of reconfigurable robots are shown in Figure 1. They are subdivided into product and production driven aspects.
