Autor: Alice Kirchheim

The article describes the quality inspection of micro cold formed components in the collaborative research center 747 “micro cold forming” at the University of Bremen. These components, e.g. small springs in cell phones, are manufactured with a speed of up to 300 parts per minute in a micro cold forming machine. Overall dimensions are below 1mm. These dimensions lie in a field between tactile measuring techniques of form and position and surface metrology, e.g. roughness. Yet a high inspection rate is impossible due to problems in production engineering and metrology. Therefore, fast optical metrology, new evaluation methods and quality control is needed to ensure an economical manufacturing process for micro cold formed parts.

Due to the increasing globalization of commodity flow a growth of mass good transportation is perceptible. Therefore automatic unloading of goods and their automatic transfer to logistic systems is one of the technical challenges. Opportunities arising from automatic goods unloading are explored in [1]. A system for unloading cubic goods automatically was developed and its introduction to market started last year. Changing environments and various operational areas are the motivation for research on a cognitive system for unloading goods. Hence, a concept for a cognitive system for unloading containers is introduced in this article. The components for such a system are image processing, robot control handling system and kinematics. For each of these components cognitive methods and technologies are proposed to be integrated in an overall system.

The increasing demand of hybrid micro-technical systems resp. products in small to middle size lots, requires on the one hand new concepts from the micro production engineering and the production process planning and on the other hand methods for the development of micro production systems. Taking the postulation „small machines for small components“ into account, Micro Factories consist of highly specialized mini machines, each having a footprint of about 0,09 m² in comparison to 5 m² of conventional systems [1]. Micro Factories are arranged independently for each task to form a complex production system. Viewing the use of mini machines in micro production from the perspective of the production process, a concept for using adaptive, automatic quality control loops is proposed.