robotics in manufacturing

In recent years some of the characteristics of robots designed for home or service robotics have been introduced in the industrial sector, enabling the collaboration and the sharing of common workspaces between human and robots. This article reviews some of the commercially available new generation robots, the enabling technologies being developed at DFKI Robotics Innovation Center over the last years, as well as the current developments within the European project FourByThree.

Shoe manufacturing provides employment to a large number of European citizens. Large parts of the manufacturing process are still dominated by manual work. Robotic solutions to automate and optimize the production can ensure that European companies, in particular manufacturers of high-quality, high-price fashion shoes, retain their competitive edge on the global markets. There are many sectors of industry, in particular industrial production, that have a strong need for practical, flexible, and human-like manipulation and gripping. This is true in particular for SMEs characterized by fast changing product-cycles and the need for robots that can be integrated in manual product lines. In general, all industrial sectors with a high percentage of manual labour, a large number of product variants, and non-standardized or delicate products do need robots that exhibit a general flexibility and the capacity for human-like manipulation. Shoe manufacturing is an example for an industrial sector ...