chapter 7 Automated Assembly Systems

The term automated assembly refers to the use of mechanized and automated devices to perform the various functions in an assembly line or cell. Much progress has been made in the technology of assembly automation in recent years. Some of this progress has been motivated by advances in the field of robotics. Industrial robots are sometimes used as components in automated assembly systems. The applications of robots, including those in assembly operations, are described in Chapter 13. In the current chapter, we study automated assembly as a separate field of automation. Although the manual assembly methods described in Chapter 6 will no doubt be used for many years into the future, significant opportunities for productivity gains exist in the use of automated methods. For the reader interested in pursuing this topic of automated assembly in more detail, there have been several books written in the last few years that we recommend [1,3,9].
It turns out that the product’s design has a significant impact on the ease with which its assembly can be automated. We begin our chapter with this topic.