Assessment of Potentially Attractive Tasks to Collaborative Robotics Application: A Case Study Based on Electronics Industry

The use of robotics in the electronics industry has been of great importance to raise productivity and quality levels. When compared to the classic industrial robots, the collaborative ones present themselves as a trend, bringing greater flexibility, improving ergonomics, shortening implementation time and degree of configurability. However, the correct definition of their use, when compared to industrial robots, still needs more understanding and discussion so as not to become an intuitive process. The objective of this work is to present a methodology based on a time and motion study to define the tasks which have the greatest potential to be automated and to be implemented with simplicity. To validate this methodology, two consecutive stations of a packaging assembly line of smartphones were considered. The obtained results show feasibility and applicability in the tested solution, allowing it to be applied in other situations.