CyberManS

Fast and flexible manufacturing operations are critical to modern industry. Flexible manufacturing is highly dependent on manual production operations due to the lower specific investment costs involved, due to the faster decisional processes involved, and due to the faster/simpler training of staff compared to hard automation. Despite the well-known advances which have occurred over the last 30 years in the areas of robotic automation, most companies are today finding that the greatest challenge in the current international market place is that of optimising the manual production stations, and thus of optimising the work of the production staff.

From a European Union perspective, the present European situation regarding manual operations is unsatisfactory from an economic and ergonomic perspective. Several issues must be addressed in order to make production activities flexible enough to cope with the evolving international market. For example, it is often currently difficult to recruit qualified staff for factory work in several countries, due to poor ergonomic and/or psychosocial conditions. Further, the time-to-market associated with certain production processes is too long, and thus must be reduced if it is to prove economically feasible for a wide number of products. One way of reducing time-to-market involves flexible manufacturing cells, but in this case, there is often much stress on the staff due to the need to frequently change tasks and due to the need to learn the greater variety of processes needed to produce the required mix of products.

In the current European Union manufacturing landscape it is evident that new methods of production are required, particularly those involving the flexible use of human workers. Flexible production stations, and re-configurable processes, are required, and these in turn require the definition of new geometric layouts, new manufacturing equipments, and new protocols for both the manufacturing operations and the transfer operations. The development of these new production stations is complicated by the many implications which they have on the staff involved.

Careful consideration must be given to both the costs involved, and to the issues which arise in the areas of health and safety. For example, specialized manufacturing equipment which supports the human operator can be costly to develop and to maintain, thus negating the potential benefits associated with the increased flexibility. Further, current European health-and-safety legislation sets important ergonomic requirements for production stations, particularly in the area of musculoskeletal disorders. An additional, complicating, factor which is specific to the European Union workforce is that the production technologies must accommodate an older workforce. It is a well-known fact that the EU workforce is ageing rapidly, and that this requires improvements in production station ergonomics so as to reduce the risk of short term injury and long term illness.

Intelligent work assistant devices (IWADs) based on mechatronic technology are one of the most promising methods of improving the flexibility and cost effectiveness of manual production stations, particularly of flexible production stations. These devices, which operate in the gray area between traditional manual workstations and fully automated/robotized workstations, are based on the concept of cooperation between human workers and machine workers. While the concept of machine assistants is not a new one, most physical (as opposed to computer-based) implementations of this idea are actually currently in their infancy. For European industry, the availability of efficient IWADs may be the key to containing production costs and to maintaining technological leadership. The design, development and application of IWADs is a topic which the CyberManS project consortium believes is critical to EU industrial success in the international marketplace.

The CyberManS project addresses the IST-NMP1 joint call, which has the aim of developing “Integrating Technologies for Fast and Flexible Manufacturing enterprise". The project will perform pre-competitive research to develop both advanced ergonomic tools, and IWADs, to improve the flexibility and cost effectiveness of flexible production stations. The research activities of the CyberManS project are all directed towards the achievement of two main product outputs:

§         A software interface for work activity simulation which includes a database, ergonomic criteria, costing criteria, a simulation tool and a virtual reality function.

§         An intelligent work assistant device (IWAD) for manual production tasks.

In order to provide sufficient technical expertise to achieve the project outputs, the assembled CyberManS project consortium includes 11 partners who operate in the European automotive, automation, ergonomic and university sectors. The consortium represents an important cross-section of the European Union advanced manufacturing sector. Therefore, the CyberManS project provides both an important research opportunity and a vehicle for industrial change within the EU.