Lua Programming in HRC Workstation Design

Abstract: Close collaboration between human operators and industrial robots is one approach to meet thechallenges of increased global competition and demographic change for manufacturingcompanies in the developed countries. These human-industrial robot collaborative (HRC)assembly systems combine human flexibility, intelligence and tactile sense with robotic speed, endurance and repeatability. However, current personal safety legislation limits the possible collaborative applications that could be implemented in practice, but large research efforts areput in order to enable practical implementation of these future workstations. When the limitations of safety legislation are addressed, and the collaborative systems can beimplemented, a need to simulate these systems will rise. Virtual simulations are an importantcomponent in modern production system design and will be demanded in future assembly workstation design. A new existing software is in development that can simulate, visualise and evaluate HRC assembly workstations. The general goal with the simulation software is to design“optimal” workstations, and they enable evaluations of multiple design alternatives to reach this “optimum”. The creation of these design alternatives is challenging today as it demands a lot ofmanual work. The aim of this thesis is to tackle this issue by contributing to the development andimprovement of the simulation software through the programming of scripts in the Lua language. The scripts were developed through an iterative and trial-and-error process, combined with first-hand experience of the author in the usage of the software. The resulting scripts enable the user to perform simulations in a swift, efficient, automated and simplified way in comparison to the traditional method, reducing the need of manual work to a minimum. A large amount of simulations can be performed in a short amount of time, even without the need of human interaction. In addition, with the results of the simulations as a base, mathematical optimisation techniques have been employed in order to find the optimal HRC design of a case study station. The case study has been conducted at a workstation in a heavy vehicle manufacturer. The results of the case highlight the improvements made to the software by the scripts and how these can be used to efficiently design the HRC workstations of the future.