Standardised flexible automatic assembly – evaluating the Mark IV approach

The Assembly Systems Unit at the Royal Institute of Technology and IVF Stockholm has developed several Flexible Automatic Assembly (FAA) cell solutions over the years (Mark I, Mark II, Mark IIF and Mark III). The industrial reality, however, clearly points out that the basic notions of flexibility must be extended and be enhanced without increasing the complexity. This has led our research team to revise the ideas and solutions available for manual and automatic assembly, resulting in the Hyper Flexible Automatic Assembly (HFAA) project. The paper describes the driving factors behind the needs and objectives for the HFAA project, as well as how it will present a standardised set of assembly process‐oriented system components. The paper also describes the new Mark IV application. This industrial HFAA system is being developed in order to test the concept’s industrial viability. The HFAA concept will allow the user to start from a manual assembly station and gradually add assembly equipment. The basic concepts of stepwise automation, standard assembly machine and sub‐batch principle emanate from our previous research.