Design of the reconfigurable workstation for collaborative robot Franka

The Industry 4.0 paradigm introduced new kind of robot designed to collaborate with human workers: collaborative robot (cobot). The cobots came more into the focus with introduction of Industry 5.0 paradigm and its human-centric aims. The cobots are usually very user friendly with intuitive programming interface and manual teaching of cobot movements. However, most of the cobots are not equipped with vision system, because the system requires additional training and cost. Without vision system, the problem occurs with workstation configuration. Cobot expects to have parts and products on the same spatial positions where they were during the programming and teaching. That means the workstation needs to be reconfigurable to support easy exchange of parts and cobot’s program. In this research, conceptual design of a reconfigurable workstation has been selected, developed and constructed as the final product. The reconfigurable workstation with tooling plate has been constructed and successfully tested with collaborative robot Franka Panda on the computer RAM assembly/disassembly example.