A Human-Centered Assembly Workplace for Industry: Challenges and Lessons Learned

The increasing complexity of adapting established assembly processes to fast changing market demands is challenging European industry. Especially for highly individual products the automation of each assembly step is not feasible for both technical and economic reasons. Humans and machines have to work cooperatively in future factories. Like new programming methods for machines, human workers have to be trained for such changed situations. Therefore, this paper presents challenges and lessons learned from a 4-year research project dealing with the reduction of training effort for assembly processes by researching easily configurable, digital assistive systems. These digital assistive systems arranged on a novel 'human centered workplace' range from product-specific work instructions shown on a display and augmented reality solutions for training to collaborative robots. The overall architecture comprises a fully integrated software eco-system for engineering and operating assistive systems, a prototypical assembly station as well as a corresponding transformation process.