The demands placed on production companies are changing at a rapid pace, particularly with regard to Industry 4.0. The increasing pressure to digitalize is leading to ever more complex processes along the entire value chain. All processes relating to production, quality assurance and intralogistics are closely interlinked and must be viewed in a holistic context. Other trends such as the ever-shorter life cycle of products are also presenting manufacturers with major challenges. Digital lifestyle items in particular, such as smartphones and tablets, must be provided in ever faster cycles. This requires accelerated ramp-up processes.

In addition, the market is demanding an ever-increasing number of variants and flexible batch sizes for numerous products, which is putting manufacturers' agility to the test. There is also another trend: many companies are starting to bring back large parts of their globalized production capacities (reshoring). The main reason for this is the disruption to supply chains caused by global crises. This means that production managers usually have to completely redesign the process chains in their domestic plants. This is made all the more difficult by the ongoing shortage of skilled workers.

In order to successfully keep pace with all these challenges, industrial companies must adapt their production workflows to the new circumstances. In concrete terms, this primarily means pushing automation even further. However, traditional production lines can hardly meet this requirement. They focus too much on predefined, rigid processes and are often too slow to respond to changing conditions. Instead, a more flexible approach is required that intelligently combines various automation concepts. What is needed here is a highly effective combination of classic industrial robots, collaborative robots (cobots), autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and standardized production cells.

Flexibly adapt automation solutions

ABB offers standardized, ready-to-use application cells under the OmniVance brand, which enable modular production with simple programming and installation. © ABB

If industrial companies take this route, they will benefit from significant advantages: They can considerably simplify, accelerate and optimize work processes - and still guarantee maximum precision and product quality. Thanks to their modular design, these modern automation solutions can be adapted flexibly, quickly and easily to new tasks, process steps and product variants. Companies can make targeted use of the special advantages of the respective robotic component: Cobots, for example, are predestined to perform repetitive and tedious routine tasks. They often work hand in hand with their human colleagues or take over their tasks completely to relieve them. This allows the latter to focus on more demanding tasks and better develop their potential, which ultimately increases their motivation and satisfaction. Cobots are also easy to program and install. This makes them the ideal choice for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with little robotics expertise.

ABB, for example, makes these advantages available to user companies with its range of innovative cobots: the YuMi model, for example, has one or two arms and can be flexibly embedded in a wide variety of production scenarios thanks to its compact design. Its strengths include small-scale, precise tasks such as screw assembly. A slightly larger cobot variant, on the other hand, is the GoFa. This model is equipped with six axes and can lift loads of up to five kilograms. A third cobot model, Swifti, bridges the gap between collaborative and standard industrial robots: it is particularly suitable for applications in which a person monitors the processes or repositions parts. This is the case with assembly or polishing tasks, for example. The cobots guarantee maximum safety and, depending on the application, can collaborate with their human colleagues without a safety fence.

Autonomous mobile robots for agile networks

ABB also incorporates AMR into its holistic, flexible and modular automation concept: Thanks to the acquisition of AMR specialist Asti Mobile Robotics, the manufacturer has in-depth expertise in this regard and offers market-ready, well thought-out solutions. The mobile robots are capable of autonomously transporting a wide variety of objects such as materials, parts, assemblies or finished products between the individual workstations. The Flexley series, for example, can pull trolleys weighing up to 2,000 kg and lift and transport racks, containers and pallets weighing up to 1,500 kg. AMRs can be used not only for handling during production, but also for all warehouse logistics and order picking processes. This enables companies to significantly increase their productivity, improve the efficiency and agility of their processes and reduce operating costs at the same time.

Today, flexible approaches are needed in production and intralogistics to intelligently combine different automation concepts. ABB has a portfolio of machine automation, robotics and AMR solutions for this purpose. © ABB

Standardized production cells form the third element in the holistic automation approach of the future. As preconfigured complete solutions, they combine various components such as robots, control systems, software, grippers and other components. The manufacturing cells can be installed flexibly and easily, which ensures rapid operational readiness, high scalability and variable application options. ABB Robotics supports and automates the entire process workflow with its robot-assisted OmniVance manufacturing cells - from parts feeding to goods retrieval. The systems are fully networked and communicate with each other. This allows production data to be flexibly exchanged, aggregated, analyzed and visualized. On this basis and with AI support, faster, better quality and more informed decisions can then be made for production control.

Maximum flexibility is the be-all and end-all when it comes to networked and optimized production processes. A modular, mobile and collaborative automation concept supports this goal. The perfect interplay of all robotic solutions such as cobots, AMR and standardized production cells raises the efficiency of production processes to a whole new level, even with smaller batch sizes. As a result, companies will benefit from higher productivity in the future and can adapt their production flexibly and at reasonable cost to the new challenges.