The automotive industry is experiencing a significant technological transformation, driven by increasing functional safety requirements and rising competitive pressure, necessitating substantial investments. Thus, reducing manufacturing costs by enhancing efficiency in assembly is inevitable to maintain a competitive position in the automotive market. Despite advances in automotive production technology, many assembly tasks are still performed manually. Current research focuses on individual automation solutions, without sufficiently considering industrial practicality. To address this issue, a methodology is proposed to determine the automation suitability and integrability of components into production lines and their corresponding assembly processes, which is essential for optimizing efficiency. This enables the identification of challenges in automation integration, rather than attributing difficulties solely to component characteristics.Hence, a systematic approach to evaluate automation potential and identifying improvement strategies, with a focus on wire harnesses, is proposed. To assess how well components can be integrated into existing or future assembly lines, the concept of line integrability is introduced. The results show that the proposed Fuzzy-AHP-TOPSIS framework allows the identification of optimization potentials and provides guidance for implementing automated assembly systems in the automotive industry.

This paper presents a novel approach to designing, a low-cost gripper that is highly repeatable and functionally integrated. The gripper is optimized to compensate for gripping errors with particular consideration to potential challenges of articulated robots. The primary design goal is to achieve maximum repeatability during the gripping and releasing stages of a pick-and-place process for a chip-like silicon die. The design is centered around a custom printed circuit board integrates functionality for vision-based error compensation, vacuum level monitoring, part contact detection, and detection of abnormal vibrations. We detail our design requirements and specific design choices for the mechanical and electronic design and provide qualitative and quantitative experimental validation of the achieved repeatability and the integrated functions.