多品种、小批量的协作灵活组装：无围栏、可追踪

By Liang Wei, Senior Application Engineer, EVST — collaborative assembly and fastening cells.

Last updated: 16 June 2026.

Answer first:For high-mix, low-volume assembly, a collaborative robot drops the safety fence (after an ISO/TS 15066 risk assessment), changes product in minutes via drag-to-teach and a program library, and tightens every fastener to a closed-loop torque target with a per-bolt record. It fits when you have many products in small batches, frequent changeover, traceable-torque requirements, or a floor too tight for a fenced cell — cases where a dedicated rig is scrapped on every product change.

What is collaborative flexible assembly?

It’s an assembly cell built around a collaborative robot (cobot) that shares the workspace with operators instead of being locked behind a fence. The cobot does the repeatable work — locate, pick, assemble, tighten, confirm — while a person handles the flexible, judgment tasks alongside it. “Flexible” means the same cell runs many products: you change the job by recalling a program, not by rebuilding tooling.

A dedicated rig is efficient for one product at volume — and a poor fit for many products in small batches.

First,changeover is expensive.Hard tooling for product A is scrapped or re-set when product B arrives; the engineering and downtime per change eat the economics.

Second,torque rides on feel.Manual fastening leaves no record of the value reached — exactly what quality systems want you to prove.

Third,volume can’t amortize the rig.Low batches never pay back heavy fixed automation.

Fourth,fences eat floor.A fenced industrial cell needs space many high-mix shops don’t have.

How a collaborative cell changes the math

Fence-free (after ISO/TS 15066).Power- and force-limited operation, validated by a task risk assessment, lets the cobot work next to people — saving the floor a fence would consume. Fence-free is an engineered outcome, not a default: change the part, tool or takt and the assessment is redone.

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