Automation of metal cutting of body in white : Thesis project at Volvo Cars on cutting and automated solutions

This thesis has been done in collaboration with Volvo Cars. They currently do their Body In White (BIW) cutting manually through the use of power tools which has major issues such as safety and, for certain cuts, time. The work performed was a deep analysis of the current body-in-white cutting process, as well as existing solutions for the cutting, grip-ping and automation of the process and its safety requirements. While solutions are pre-sented, the prospect of a fully automated cutting is very unlikely currently due to both con-straints geometrically, technically, financially and timewise as the automation of this task is not going to be profitable from an efficiency standpoint. Regardless, this should provide enough information and results to be a first step towards an improvement of the current process, focusing on operator safety and well-being by the proposal of a semi-automated solution by using a robot to hold & perform the cut, piloted by an operator in the vicinity of the workspace.