MADE Digital Demonstration Projects

Assembly of small batch size PCB’s with Paul E. Danchell

While today a majority of printed circuit boards (PCBs) are populated with surface mounted components (SMD) specific use cases for through-hole components (THD) are still common and unlikely to disappear. While SMD assembly is highly automated similar technology for THD does not exist for small to medium scale production. Paul E. Danchell A/S as a PCB assembly house is interested in a solution that can be made to work for small-scale production. MADE Digital will, therefore, investigate the feeding, grasping and insertion technologies required for THD mounting and how to come up with a solution that enables quick setup and low error processes.

Automating manufacturing of composite structures for blades with Vestas

Manufacturing of large composite structures such as blades for wind turbines is today a largely manual task, hence the labour cost is a significant part of the final price of the product. Automated solutions such as tape laying machines are today used within the aerospace industry, but are not economically feasible in the wind turbine industry, in which the amount of fibers to be placed per hour is significantly higher. MADE Digital will, therefore, investigate new techniques for automating manufacturing of double curved composite structures.

Collaborative robots for mould assembly and disassembly with LEGO

The production of bricks at LEGO requires manual preparations steps, which can be tedious and time consuming. Here, the LEGO demonstrator aims at developing a collaborative, robot-based solution for helping with the preparation steps with a special focus on supporting the workers on object handling, reoccurring, simple tasks, and monitoring the correct procedures. According to the scope of MADE Digital, the LEGO demonstrator will be designed and finally operated based on comprehensive 3D digital models of the task objects and the automated components of the demonstrator, including robots, grippers, fixtures and sensors. Beyond just representing passive geometries from CAD data, the resulting digital models will allow for simulation and control of the functionalities of the various components following the concept of “Digital twins”.

Curve and surface processes with collaborative robots for applications at B&O

For 3D surface and curve processes such as milling, cutting, curve sharpening, painting, glueing, etc., the 3D geometry information of the objects to be handled is today digitally available from CAD/CAM systems. However, if the execution is to be performed with a collaborative robot that is moved around in production, there are two issues: i) The forces from the process may lead to deflections of the robot and ii) the location of the robot relative to the workpiece may vary. Both issues require an online automatic adjustment of the trajectory. The goal of this project is to derive a method that as input takes the geometry of the workpiece from a CAD/CAM system and automatically produces a solution that takes into account calibration issues, deviations due to process forces and uses real time sensorial feedback to (semi-)automatically produce the solution trajectory.

Collaborative assembly of randomly located parts at Danfoss

Danfoss has many subtasks where parts are manually taken from random locations (typically in trays), assembled on a fixture and placed in a machine. In this project, we have selected a representative application and with that, we will study what part of the subtask that can be automated and what part still should be done manually. This includes e.g. feeding the parts and placing the parts on the fixture while combining manual and robotic subassemblies.