Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Martin Manns

Vision

Quite often assembly is a substantial wage cost factor for the producing industry. However, it can be optimized by automation. High assembly competencies are an important location factor for a society which wants to keep a local, competitive production and thus jobs.

The demand for differentiated products has caused the producing companies to adapt their series assembly to the individual customer requests as well as to use natural materials like leather-covered molded parts of high-quality appearance whose automated handling is difficult. At the same time the enhanced focus on short-term market developments increases the uncertainty regarding the requirements on assembly systems along their life cycle. These trends have led to a reduction of the degree of automation in assembly in Germany during the last decades. Furthermore, a special focus was put on the so-called Low-Cost-Automation and the assembly was made more flexible e.g. by means of service providers. Due to falling transport costs assembly in countries with lower wages than in Germany has become attractive. A lot of assembly sectors “also of medium-sized companies” has moved from high-wage countries like Germany and France to other countries within Europe and beyond.

Research and teaching at the FAMS will deal with the key question how production and assembly automation can be adapted to the changing requirements so that the existing automation competencies allow a competitive assembly of serial production in high-wage countries.

Equipment

Robots

3D Printers

Sensors

Conveyors

Experiments