Life Cycle Simulation Applied to a Robot Manipulator - An Example of Aging Simulation of Manufacturing Facilities -

Abstract Evaluation of the aging process of manufacturing facilities is essential for life cycle facility management, which includes such activities as design for reliability and maintainability and maintenance planning. For this purpose, we have developed a life cycle simulation system for robot manipulators. The developed system can simulate the wear of gears and bearings of joints as component deterioration and evaluate the resultant positioning error of an end-effector as functional degradation. The system is applied to assembly robots of a car parts manufacturing plant. The simulation results correspond to the failure history of the robots fairly well.