PDEng positions in Robotics: Design of an automated assembly process for butterfly valves

The PDEng programme is a 2-year post MSc technological programme with a focus on technological design. This programme at the University of Twente contain an educational part that will be followed at the University, and a design project that will be carried out at Wouter Witzel. The educational programme will have an in-depth and broadening character with ample attention for professional development and will be partly tailored to the design project. In collaboration with Wouter Witzel, high level, creative and new designs for complex issues will be aimed at.

Within the current Smart Industry roadmap the internet of things (IoT), high level robotic manipulators and increased hard and software opportunities for automation are among others seen as important new drivers for modernizing the European production industry. Within this vision especially the automation of critical production and assembly orders in small series is seen as an important challenge.

Wouter Witzel (Losser, the Netherlands) is a company that produces butterfly valves for among others the water & oil industry. While many production steps of the Dutch plant have been automated this is not the case for the assembly process, making it one of the most labor intensive departments of Wouter Witzel. The goal of Wouter Witzel is to automate the assembly process for the smaller butterfly valves in order to reduce costs, increase product quality and improve the general competiveness of Wouter Witzel. A typical assembly process requires 21 assembly steps and several assembly orientations and deals with product assembly series of 1 to 100.

The goals of this design project is to define the assembly environment for assembling the butterfly valves. It is envisioned that this environment will consist of robots/co-bots and dedicated, intelligent and adaptable product fixtures. The design, prototyping and testing of these fixtures and the interaction with the robotics is a major part of this assignment.

Deadline Application: 05-09-2016

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PDEng positions in Robotics: Design of an automated assembly process for butterfly valves