Cost-effective and lightweight cobot in demonstrator for mechanical engineering students at TH Cologne

What was needed: A demonstrator for mechanical engineering students, consisting of conveyor belts and a cobot.

Requirements: Compact, lightweight, cost-effective

Industry: Material handling

Success for the customer: The ReBeL cobot undertakes pick & place tasks in the demonstrator. Consisting mainly of high-performance plastics, it weighs no more than 8kg and is therefore easy to transport at the university. Since it costs only a fraction of commercially available cobots, TH Cologne remains within the budget specifications.

To prepare students optimally for their professional lives, universities try to convey their teaching content not only theoretically, but also practically. The case of the Technical University (TH) of Cologne showed that this is not always that easy. In the university's Mechanical Engineering Master's degree programme, production processes should not only be understood, but also experienced at first hand.

This is made possible by an Industry 4.0 demonstrator that maps a real production environment in miniature. Handling, material transport, and quality inspection in production are demonstrated on a compact table with a width of 900mm and a length of 1,200mm.

The challenge here: It was not just a question of finding an individual solution for the compact format of the conveyor line. A weight problem also had to be solved. Because the table had to be easy to push from one lecture hall to the next. A lightweight and compact solution had to be found for the cobot, which is intended to perform pick & place tasks on the conveyor belt, while at the same time fitting into the university's limited budget for didactic equipment. Because standard articulated arm robots on the market often cost tens of thousands of euros.

To make the demonstrator for the university as space-saving and lightweight as possible, the ReBeL cobot was chosen. The lightweight robot weighs just 8kg and costs only a fraction of conventional articulated arm robots on the market.

The conveyor technology around the cobot was perfectly tailored to the tight space requirements and supplied together with the table by the mk Technology Group.

The conveyor belts transport two discs with a diameter of 100 and 150mm, which the ReBeL places on them. A camera was installed on the second conveyor belt to check how precisely the discs are positioned on top of each other. At the end of the third conveyor belt, the cobot picks up the discs one by one and places them on the first belt. The process starts over.

Based on the setup, Master's students can not only model the entire production process, but also perform real-time analysis and optimise the processes. The lightweight design of the cobot and the compact conveyor belts enable a space-optimised, cost-effective and mobile solution that can be easily moved around the university halls in the future.