Economic generic automatic flexible assembly

Over the past twenty years there has been a significant effort to develop a generic flexible assembly system capable of performing economic assembly of multi-variant electromechanical products in small to medium batch quantities. However, despite these efforts, no commercially available system exists that is capable of meeting the technical and economic requirements. The emphasis of this thesis is the development and industrial implementation of a mechanical system for the assembly of low-to-medium volume multi-variant electromechanical products. An economic and technical analysis of different assembly technologies has been made, which identified that the concept of generic flexible assembly is both technically and economically feasible in the year 2001. An analysis of industrial assembly and feeding problems has been conducted, the output of which has been used to develop the specifications of the required mechanical subsystems of a generic flexible automatic assembly system, and specify their method of integration. [Continues.]