Towards Industrial Robots as a Service (IRaaS): Flexibility, usability, safety and business models
Industrial robots form an integral part of today’s manufacturing industry, due to their high versatility, precision, and fatigue proof nature. Yet, many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) still predominantly rely on manual labor. The main barriers that prevent SMEs from utilizing robots to a larger degree are described to be the large initial investment, uncertainty about costs (total cost of ownership), and lack of expertise. An opportunity to eliminate these barriers can be found in servitisation. While paradigms such as software as a service (SaaS) or Robot as a Service (RaaS) already exist, these focus mostly on software (functionality) via cloud computing. In this paper, a new paradigm based on software and hardware is proposed as Industrial Robots as a Service (IRaaS), which is composed of four elements: Flexibility (Plug and Produce), Usability (Easy Programming, Intuitive Interaction), Safety (Standards, Strategies), and Business Models (Time-based, Usage-based). To provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art a scoping survey is performed on each of the four key elements from an IRaaS perspective.
Funding
Industrial Robots-as-a-Service (IRaaS) - Resilient and responsive manufacturing systems enabled by rapidly deployable mobile robots
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Find out more...History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
- Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Department
- Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering
Published in
Robotics and Computer Integrated ManufacturingVolume
81Issue
June 2023Pages
20 pp.Publisher
Elsevier Ltd.Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© 2022 The Author(s)Publisher statement
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Acceptance date
2022-11-06Publication date
2022-11-16Copyright date
2022ISSN
0736-5845eISSN
1879-2537Publisher version
Language
- en