Assembly automation is well established as hard automation in the manufacturing industry with proven economic advantages in mass production. Modern industries are adopting mass customization as a new strategy to handle the increasing diversity in customer demands. The main challenge is to produce an increasing variety of products with mass production efficiency. Conventional assembly tooling is not flexible enough to handle the product variations. Also the existing flexible assembly tooling usually operates at lower throughput rates. Hence new type of assembly tooling is needed to impart flexibility, while retaining the capability of high throughput rates. This research is aimed to redesign the existing part-feeders and feed tracks into modular, parametric tooling. An approach for devel...[ Read more ]

Assembly automation is well established as hard automation in the manufacturing industry with proven economic advantages in mass production. Modern industries are adopting mass customization as a new strategy to handle the increasing diversity in customer demands. The main challenge is to produce an increasing variety of products with mass production efficiency. Conventional assembly tooling is not flexible enough to handle the product variations. Also the existing flexible assembly tooling usually operates at lower throughput rates. Hence new type of assembly tooling is needed to impart flexibility, while retaining the capability of high throughput rates. This research is aimed to redesign the existing part-feeders and feed tracks into modular, parametric tooling. An approach for developing the modular, parametric part-feeders is presented. Using this approach, some parametric nonvibratory feeders are designed and developed. Conceptual designs for modular, parametric gravity feed tracks are also presented.