Design of Dual-Arm Robot for IT Product Automation System

Abstract

According to the rapid growth of the IT product market in recent, the necessity to automate the production process increases. Since IT products require manufacturing multi-kinds with small quantity, it mostly depends on manual production process. In this process, it has a disadvantage of requiring many skilled workers and causes many other problems such as increasing the labor charge, decreasing the labor population, deteriorating working condition and so on. To solve these problems, automating IT product manufacturing process is very efficient. However, traditional industrial robots have limitations of scale and degree of freedom (DoF), so that it needs extensive modification in manufacturing lines to implement the automation. Moreover, two robots are basically required to substitute a dedicated human worker. Therefore, the development of dual-arm robot, which enables the automation of manufacturing lines with minimum changes, is necessary. There have been various researches to develop the dual-arm robot in the industrial robot production area. To apply the robot automation system in the IT product manufacturing industry, however, there are many limitations caused by various problems such as low payload capacity, narrow workspace, low performance of repeatability, deficient degree of freedom comparing to a human worker, and so on. In this paper, the development of the dual-arm robot, which is adequate for the automation system of IT production, is proposed. The Proposed dual-arm has been designed based on the analysis of the target product and its manufacturing task after defining the design procedures. Furthermore, it has been planned to have similar levels of scale, DoF, and workspace with a human worker to minimize changes in existing production lines for automation. After then, it has been aimed to have sufficient payload capacity, rotation velocity on joints, and repeatability to carry out target tasks.