Empowering Human Workers for Assembly of Wire Harnesses (EWASS)

Empowering Human Workers for Assembly of Wire Harnesses (EWASS)

Project time: 2022 – 2025

Budget: 11 150 000 sek

Funding: SIP Produktion2030

The project's goal is to assist industry enabling sustainable work for operators during assembly of wire harnesses.

Electrification in vehicles result in a growing number of electrical connections, resulting in increasing numbers of monotonous, repetitive, and strenuous manual assemblies of wire harnesses and high voltage cables. Wire harness installations are among the most common causes of ergonomics issues in plants. As a result, the positive shift towards electrification also negatively impacts the workforce regarding gender equality, age distribution, and the long-term sustainability of the work environment.
The project’s goal is to assist the industry in ensuring a sustainable work-life by empowering human workers during assembly of wire harnesses. The objective is to improve productivity, quality, and ergonomics of assembly installation of wire harnesses and high voltage cables using collaborative robots.
Novel technologies such as cobots can empower the assembly worker by assisting in existing operations and mitigating work-related health problems. However, there are significant challenges to resolve before successfully introducing cobots in the assembly. Besides common challenges with cobots such as productivity, safety, and achieving smooth and trustful cooperation with the operator, the design of harnesses and cables also requires special attention. These challenges can be handled already in the design and manufacturing planning phase with the help of virtual/digital tools by simulating the entire operation, including humans, cobots, and wire harnesses. However, simulating and emulating a human-robot collaboration operation of a flexible wire harness is hard, considering the deformable materials and irregular shapes of wire harnesses and the introduction of cobots in moving lines with high human involvement.
The proposed project aims to address and solve these challenges with the help of world-class competence and facilities in collaboration with consortium partners.

Vinnovas diarienr: 2022-01279

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