Luís Gonzaga Trabasso

Design for Autonomy: Integrating Technology Transfer into Product Development Process

This paper presents the integrated product development tool Design for Autonomy for reengineering of complex products. The objective is to assure that the product can be designed, produced and operated in Brazil for a defined period of time at a minimum risk of being dependent on export bans or unavailability of components. This tool is a new member of the Design for X family, which aims at integrating the requirements from the autonomy area into the conceptual phase of the product development process. Development guidelines derived from the procedures of the generic Design for X development framework are presented that lead to a balance between functionality and operability. The Design for Autonomy tool contains four steps: (1) Analysis of the product in order to identify critical elements; (2) Preparation of nationalization; (3) Reverse engineering of the original product in order to obtain technological know-how; and (4) Forward engineering for a national product, stimulating improvements and added value. The implementation can be evaluated by qualitative and quantitative performance criteria comparing the national product with the baseline configuration of the original product. The Design for Autonomy tool is being successfully applied and verified on a pilot project in the Brazilian space sector.

A comparison of industrial robots interface: force guidance system and teach pendant operation

Purpose This paper aims to propose an evaluation method to compare two different Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) solutions that can be used for on-line programming in an industrial context: a force guidance system and the traditional teach pendant operation. Design/methodology/approach The method defines three evaluation criteria (agility, accuracy and learning) and describes an experimental approach based on the analysis of variance to verify the performance of guidance systems according to these criteria. This method is used in this paper to compare the traditional teach pendant interface with an implementation of a force guidance system based on the use of an external force/torque sensor. Findings The application of the proposed method to an off-the-shelf industrial robot shows that the force guidance system has a better performance according to the agility criterion. Both solutions have a similar performance for the accuracy criterion, with a limit of about 2 mm in the achieved position accuracy. Regarding the learning criterion, the authors cannot affirm that any of the methods has an improved agility when the operator repeats the tasks. Practical implications This work supports the selection of guidance systems to be used in on-line programming of industrial applications. It shows that the force guidance system is an option potentially faster than the teach pendant when the required positioning accuracy is greater than 2 mm. Originality/value The new method proposed in this paper can be applied to a large range of robots, not being limited to commercial available collaborative robots. Furthermore, the method is appropriate to accomplish further investigations in HRI not only to compare programming methods but also to evaluate guidance systems approaches or robot control systems.

Avaliação metrológica de um robô industrial para montagem estrutural de aeronaves

The aircraft fuselage assembly process is too labor intensive and highly manual within the Brazilian aircraft industry. Foreign companies of this industrial segment started the adoption of automated solutions in the last two decades. Their automated solutions are very product dependent as well as very expensive. This kind of solution is inadequate for the Brazilian aircraft industry. This paper shows the preliminary results of a flexible, low cost automated system specially designed to fit the Brazilian requirements. This is based upon the usage of industrial robots for general purposes. In order to check the feasibility of such a solution, the process requirements are expressed in terms of accuracy, repeatability and resolution of the robots. These characteristics are measured by two independent, state-of-art measurement systems, namely, Indoor GPS and photogrammetry device. The initial results allow one to conclude that the robot can be used for the purpose described herein as long as it is assisted by correction process based upon the very measurement systems used to acquire its operational characteristics

Product customisation through postponement and CE tools integration in an aerospace company

This paper aims to demonstrate a method to implement a product customisation strategy in an aerospace company through the integration between postponement and CE tools:

Space Mission Architecture Trade off Based on Stakeholder Value

One the most difficult aspects of system conceptualization process is to recognize, understand and manage the trade-offs in a way that maximizes the success of the product. This is particularly important for space projects. In this way, a major part of the system engineer’s role is to provide information that the system manager can use to make the right decisions. This includes identification of alternative architectures and characterization of those elements in a way that helps managers to find out, among the alternatives, a design that provides a better combination of the various technical areas involved in the design. Space mission architecture consists of a broad system concept which is the most fundamental statement of how the mission will be carried out and satisfy the stakeholders. The architecture development process starts with the stakeholder analysis which enables the identification of the decision drivers, then, the requirements are analysed for elaborationg the system concept. Effectiveness parameters such as performance, cost, risk and schedule are the outcomes of the stakeholder analysis which are labelled as decision drivers to be used in a trade off process to improve the managerial mission decisions. Thus, the proposal presented herein provides a means for innovating the mission design process by identifying drivers through stakeholder analysis and use them in a trade off process to obtain the stakeholder satisfaction with effectiveness parameters.

ELM based architecture for general purpose automatic weight and structure learning

Abstract Currently, neural networks deliver state of the art performance on multiple machine learning tasks, mainly because of their ability to learn features. However, the architecture of the neural network still requires problem-specific tuning and the long training times and hardware requirements remain an issue. In this work, the Multi-Scale Auto-Tuned Extreme Learning Machine (MSATELM) architecture is proposed, which does not require any manual feature crafting or architecture tuning and automatically learns structure and weights using an auto-tuned ELM as building block. It learns a simple model that achieves the required accuracy. The GPU implementation in OpenCL allows handling any number of samples while still delivering portable code and high performance. Results on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and UCI datasets demonstrate that this approach provides competitive results even though no problem-specific tuning is used.

A Low-cost Vision Based Air Hockey System

Air Hockey is a sport practiced in a table with low friction. Two players competing against each other holding paddles that are used to hit a puck with the objective of getting scores every time the puck enters the opponents goal. This paper covers the development of low-cost vision based air hockey system capable of playing a match of Air Hockey against a human player. The system is composed by a robot, a camera and an Arduino MEGA board. The efficiency of the robot is presented in the final experiment, which justifies the possibility of using the system as a training environment for professional players.

Study Phase—Value Proposition Activities

While the value identification activities were concerned about understanding and structuring all the value pulled by the stakeholders, the next step in the PDP aims to develop a possible functional architecture that can deliver this value, which is the chief engineer’s vision of the upcoming product/service. The value proposition documents in this vision differ from the initial pulled (product) vision. This value proposition is deeply rooted in the identified value set, and defines which product/service functional architecture is the preferable choice to deliver this set and yet mitigate its related risks, therefore guaranteeing the PDP uninterrupted flow. This chapter uses the stall recovery system project example to present a stepwise execution of this phase’s activities, where special emphasis is given to defining the best candidate product’s functions to SBCE.

The Product Development System

This chapter shows the particularities of the Product Development System, with special emphasis to the Product Development Process (PDP). PDP itself is people-based, complex, and non-linear, with high ambiguity and uncertainty. Consequently, a wide spectrum of variables can affect its success, and, not surprisingly, over time, over budget and low quality are commonplaces on PD projects. By discussing the PDP characteristics and its consequences, we aim to show that having a high performance PDP is not an easy task to any company; therefore competitive advantage comes from accepting these particularities and understanding how they affect your particular PDP. Far from neglecting these particularities, the lean company deeply understands them, how they affect its particular reality, and shape its PDP to exploit its strengths and avoid its weaknesses.

The Lean Product Development Organizational Culture

This chapter presents the main aspects related to organizational cultures which support the lean philosophy. Organizational culture is unique for every organization; it is not easily defined and even harder to change. It is essentially the cause and effect of the sum of all the written and unwritten rules, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and traditions which contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. All lean processes, tools and techniques are effective if supported by a lean enabling organizational culture. This culture allows the integration and alignment from all performed processes, regardless of whether they are being supported by lean labeled or non-labeled tools and techniques. Do not forget that are not the tools used by an organization that makes it a Lean Organization, but how it uses these very tools.