Development of a manufacturing cell for fixtureless joining in car body assembly

Zusammenfassung

The integration of electric drivetrain components into the chassis of automobiles dramatically increases the variety of car body designs and calls for changes to the production processes. One approach is to replace the typical assembly line manufacturing process with a workshop production system, as has already happened in machining, where transfer lines have been replaced by flexible manufacturing systems. One requirement for this shift is the development of a flexible joining cell which can perform different stages of joining operations on different variations of a vehicle. One step in the development of such a cell is the replacement of mechanical positioning elements, used to define the parts’ relative positions before joining. In this work, the positioning of the components is done using a camera-based measuring system and a control loop to reorient the robots holding the parts. This paper describes how the system is developed and implemented in a demonstration cell.