Reliability and Quality Control Approach for Collaborative Assembly Process

Collaborative assembly is envisaged as a prospect of industry 4.0 which involves co-working between robot and human. This methodology combines the strength and dexterity of a robot with sensory skills of human to achieve quality and precision in the assembly process. The collaborative assembly has been in focus in recent times, however, less attention has been paid to its quality and reliability aspect. Since both human worker and robot add variation to the process, making it prone to inaccuracy, defects and, rejection, it is indispensable to assess its effectiveness in terms of quality and reliability. This paper presents an approach for reliability and quality control in a collaborative assembly process. In this regard, key characteristics of assembly and process parameters of both human and robot have been identified, and their influence on assembly quality is determined. The parameters analyzed using correlation and regression modeling. Based on the analysis of data and results, a sensitivity analysis is done, and a control mechanism is formulated. The proposed approach has been applied to a collaborative assembly process of an industrial case to exemplify it, and promising results have been obtained.