Abstract
In order to avoid working in a constrained hazardous environment, manual spray painting operation is gradually being replaced by automated robotic systems in many manufacturing industries. Application of spray painting robots ensures defect-free painting of dissimilar components with higher repeatability, flexibility, productivity, reduced cycle time and minimum wastage of paint. Due to availability of a large number of viable options in the market, selection of a spray painting robot suitable for a given application poses a great problem. Thus, this paper proposes the integrated application of step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) methods to identify the most apposite spray painting robot for an automobile industry based on seven evaluation criteria (payload, mass, speed, repeatability, reach, cost and power consumption). The SWARA method identifies cost as the most significant criterion based on a set preference order, whereas, Fanuc P-350iA/45 is selected as the best spray painting robot by CoCoSo method. The derived ranking results are also contrasted with other popular multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques (TOPSIS, VIKOR, COPRAS, PROMETHEE and MOORA) and subjective criteria weighting methods (AHP, PIPRECIA, BWM and FUCOM). High degrees of similarity in the ranking patterns between the adopted approach and other MCDM techniques prove its effectiveness in solving complex industrial robot selection problems. This integrated approach is proved to be quite robust being almost unaffected by the changing values of the corresponding tuning parameter in low-dimensional MCDM problems.
Highlights
Spray painting is a technique where a special device is utilized to spray a coating, mainly paint, ink, varnish etc. through the air onto a finished surface
Keeping in view the identified research gaps, this paper proposes an integrated application of step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) methods for identifying the most suitable robot for spray painting operations in an automobile industry
The proposed method is quite robust being insensitive with respect to variations in the corresponding tuning parameter value for low-dimensional multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems
Summary
Spray painting is a technique where a special device is utilized to spray a coating, mainly paint, ink, varnish etc. through the air onto a finished surface. A five or six-axis (degree of freedom) robot capable of complex arm and wrist motions is usually preferred Among these axes, three are for the base motions and the remaining are for applicator orientation (Gujela et al, 2015). While selecting a robot for a given painting task, due consideration needs to be provided on its various specifications and capabilities, like space requirement, ability to paint dissimilar parts at high production rate, speed, purchase cost including additional expenses of integrating it into the paint system, cycle time, simplicity of programming, repeatability, work envelop, payload, mechanical weight, etc. A real-time spray painting robot selection problem is solved in Section 4 along with a comparative analysis of the ranking performance of SWARA-CoCoSo method against other integrated MCDM techniques.
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