Franz Dietrich

• Prof. Dr.-Ing.
• Profesor (full) and Lead of Handling and Assembly Technology Research at Technische Universität Berlin

Production environments and systems are transforming, driven by changing economic concepts, consumer demands and ecological guidelines. Linked to this, concepts for small-scale production systems in urban areas are evolving. These systems attempt to incorporate flexibility and individuality in both processes and products in range, variety and amoun...

In the circular economy, remanufacturing success relies heavily on the accurate identification and classification of used products. Processes, which rely on worker experience, lack objective validation, leading to the potential for mislabeling and inaccurate damage assessment. This, in turn, results in additional manual evaluations and unproductive...

Repair is a crucial process to recover resources and reduce waste within a circular economy. Automating manual and laborious repair processes has the potential to establish greater economization and efficiency. While research on assessing product repairability exists, there is currently limited research specifically focused on the repairability reg...

The lamination and manufacturing of an electrode-separator-composite (ESC), as an intermediate product in the battery manufacturing, has emerged as a promising avenue for increasing productivity and improving cell performance. In addition to the conventional hot lamination, high speed gluing has been the subject in the research field of battery pro...

Sustainable production is particularly effective if it includes closed material loops. Considering the system boundary of urban areas and aiming to enable sustainable urban production, these loops must therefore be closed within these areas. To achieve this, it is necessary to determine and understand the material flows within cities and to evaluat...

In lithium-ion battery (LIB) production, limp electrodes are handled gently by vacuum-pressure based handling and transport systems, which generate a fluid flow that propagates through the porous electrode coating during handling. To investigate the limits and material-damaging behavior of vacuum pressure-based handling, it is required to understan...

p>This preprint is based on an accepted paper for the Annals of Scientific Society for Assembly, Handling, and Industrial Robotics 2023, and may undergo further revisions before the final publication. This preprint presents a groundbreaking research study that focuses on the application of incremental learning processes to enhance high-throughput p...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made significant progress in supporting circular economy and reverse logistics by learning from diverse data to predict, e.g., routes or to assist workers in sorting. However, it remains an open question how AI can be integrated and trained into such operational processes, where little to no data has been collected...

Platform economy enables entirely new value creation processes with remarkable resistance to crises compared to centralized production systems. Acknowledged samples in commerce, travel accommodations, and creative media platforms are well known. Samples in production technology are, despite the potentials in platform economy, still rare. Its applic...

To provide storage capacities for the emerging markets of electromobility and stationary applications, the increase of productivity within the production of lithium‐ion batteries is crucial. A special focus lies on the assembly of the electrode‐separator‐compound as a bottleneck process within battery cell production. Consequently, novel process te...

Soft material grippers are attractive for flexible production because of their compliant adaptation to workpieces. Unfortunately, payload of such grippers is low, which inhibits widespread industrial applicability. This paper investigates the upscaling of such grippers to extend their applicability to heavy payload handling and assembly. This appli...

Machine learning based analyses of the production data promise direct improvements of manufacturing conditions and offer a way to justify involved investment costs for the data provision. In the current literature, explanatory and predictive capabilities of machine learning algorithms are described. The explanatory capabilities focus on root cause...

This study is about a method for evaluating specific product complexity. In this context, an efficient and scalable method for the development of a specific complexity assessment of highly complex products is presented. Furthermore, existing evaluation methods are analysed according to effort and benefit, thus showing the research gap and the need...

What are the benefits of simulation-driven design and optimization of stacking processes in battery cell production? This question is addressed within the scope of the paper. This work proposes a method to reduce the effort for model-based design and optimization. Based on three case studies which originate from the development of high-speed stacki...

The need to overcome productivity bottlenecks in battery-production has initiated a rich diversity of assembly-processes that have reached different maturities today. These circumstances make it particularly challenging to envision future production chains, because any direct comparison of competing candidates is vulnerable to incompleteness, unfai...

Electromobility is a new approach to the reduction of CO2 emissions and the deceleration of global warming. Its environmental impacts are often compared to traditional mobility solutions based on gasoline or diesel engines. The comparison pertains mostly to the single life cycle of a battery. The impact of multiple life cycles remains an important,...

This paper presents a compliant linkage as a standalone module that allows a mobile multi-robot system to transport objects cooperatively without explicit communication. The module is compatible with arbitrary steering kinematics and supports the cooperation among heterogeneous robots. All the required sensors and processing units are fully integra...

The use of machine learning (ML) for data analysis is constantly increasing in industry. Reverse logistics, which struggles with many uncertainties related to complex processes and can benefit from implementing ML. Yet, such solutions are often not applied due to lack of common knowledge. The goal of this paper is to support a preselection of ML al...

The number of electric vehicle batteries is expected to increase. Their integration into circular economy requires their recollection at end-of-life. Decision makers need tools to determine suitable locations of recollection centers, as the decision is not trivial. Lithium batteries are hazardous materials, which require a minimization of transport...

In order to support accelerating the diffusion of innovations in high value manufacturing related to enabling flexible mass customization, this paper presents a research-based maturity model for forecasting the speed of innovation diffusion from ideation to market saturation. The model provides an early stage applied research view of (groups of) “g...

New strategies in factory management focus on shopfloor data as a mean to achieve more flexible mass productions. In reality, the value adding usage of smart manufacturing approaches depends on the effort it takes to provide sensor and actuator data for further analysis. The concept of digital twins, that are based on a physical, a virtual and a co...

There is a number of assembly processes where the glue set time is a decisive limitation of the production throughput. Such examples can be found in micro-electronics and battery production. This article investigates into concepts, influencing factors, experimental process development, and process integration of high-speed gluing. A method for expe...

In a circular economy for remanufacturing, after each life cycle used products are returned to a remanufacturer for identification, inspection, sorting and reprocessing. Shortcomings and requirements of the remanufacturing market are identified through expert interviews and process analysis. A concept is proposed to enable an improved identificatio...

Combining wave energy converters (WECs) and offshore wind turbines (OWTs) provides an opportunity to use both offshore energy sources in the same farm. Bottom fixed hybrid wind-wave and floating hybrid wind-wave energy converters are supported by the same foundation system, which can be stated as another significant feature of the combination. A nu...

Vacuum-based handling is widely used in industrial production systems, particularly for hand-ling of sheet metal parts. The process design for such handling tasks is mostly based on approximate calculations and best-practice experience. Due to the lack of detailed knowledge about the parameters that significantly influence the seal and force transm...

This article proposes and investigates an assembly accuracy control method for assembly processes where the partners are joined during a feeding motion and where a web-driven process kinematic couples the accuracy variables. The inappropriateness of available methods arises from their restriction that only individual, non-dynamic reference points a...

Products can only exist on the market if a demand exists. Especially in the Business to Customer market, the demand is not only created by needs but also by desires, which are stimulated by information provided. In this market, remanufacturing, even though often discussed as an ecological and economical promising manufacturing solution accounts onl...

Increased product customization based on customer requirements results in a large number of variants and thus smaller batch sizes in production. In order to maintain a flexible and dynamic interlinkage within a production system in terms of industry 4.0, it is necessary to implement flexible and adaptive handling and gripping solutions into the pro...

Lithium-Ionen-Batteriezellen (LIB) erfahren eine steigende Nachfrage, vor allem in der Automobilindustrie. Um diese Nachfrage zu decken, müssen hoch produktive und kosteneffiziente Verfahren in der Batteriezellproduktion zur Verfügung stehen. In diesem Beitrag werden die Entwicklung und die Verkettung neuer Prozesse für die Batteriezellproduktion v...

Electrode manufacturing requires multiple process steps, e.g. dispersing and coating. In‐between these steps intermediate products have to be transferred, stored and handled. Especially for the development of new active materials or electrode formulations, the variety of parameters which need to be screened is enormous. In addition, these materials...

In this paper, a novel Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique for robot-based fabrication of large-scale freeform reinforced concrete elements is presented. The AM technology, called Shotcrete 3D Printing (SC3DP), is based on an automated shotcreteing process and offers the ability to integrate structural reinforcement in both principal directions a...

Fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) are considered to be the key materials in the automotive industry in fields of lightweight and CO2 reduction. Hybrid structures of materials such as steel or aluminum and fiber-reinforced plastics, such as carbon fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRP) or glass fiber-reinforced plastics (GFRP), will be used to reduce vehicl...

Incremental Manufacturing is a hybrid-manufacturing concept where standardized base workpieces are made in large volume production first and finalized by additive manufacturing. The concept reduces the need for product-specific molds and tools, enabling a multi-scale production - the flexibility to scale product variants and sizes as well as produc...

One of the greatest potentials to be exploited within Industry 4.0 is the large amount of production data generated during a manufacturing process. The information can be used to predict failures and either take early corrective measures or to interrupt the production process for prevention of defective goods. This paper introduces a methodology th...

The assembly of deformable components is difficult to automate due to the complex assembly movements and uncertain component geometry. Sensor-guided or deliberately compliant robots can address these issues at the cost of an enlarged parameter space of the assembly process. Machine Learning in the form of artificial neural networks (ANN) is propose...

The electrolyte filling process constitutes the interface between cell assembly and formation of lithium ion batteries. Electrolyte filling is known as a quality critical and also time consuming process step. To avoid limitations in battery quality a homogeneous electrolyte distribution is necessary. Therefore, especially large sized cells are stor...

The quality of lithium-ion battery electrodes can be characterized by manifold different analytical methods. The manufacturing of the lithium-ion battery cell, especially the assembly of the electrode-separator-composite, lacks this high variety of analytical methods. All the more, it is of great importance to characterize the ESC of the cell, due...

A central problem in automated assembly is the ramp-up phase. In order to achieve the required tolerances and cycle times, assembly parameters must be determined by extensive manual parameter variations. Therefore, the duration of the ramp-up phase represents a planning uncertainty and a financial risk, especially when high demands are placed on dy...

This paper presents methods to plan predictive maintenance for precision assembly tasks. One of the key aspects of this approach is handling the abnormalities during the development phase, i.e. before and during process implementation. The goal is to identify abnormalities which are prone to failure and finding methods to monitor them. To achieve t...

A key problem in human robot collaboration is a safe movement of the robot. The reason for this lies mainly in the variety of possible different events that can occur in an unstructured environment. Especially the description of a variable working space and the movements of humans are difficult to represent deterministically. In this paper, an appr...

During the last years lithium-ion batteries have emerged as the power source of choice for the electric vehicle market. One important step of the lithium-ion battery process chain is electrolyte filling. The electrolyte filling process constitutes the interface between cell assembly and formation and is a quality critical and also time consuming pr...

Production technology for automotive lithium-ion battery (LIB) cells and packs has improved considerably in the past five years. However, the transfer of developments in materials, cell design and processes from lab scale to production scale remains a challenge due to the large number of consecutive process steps and the significant impact of mater...

Traction batteries are composed of various materials that are both economic valuable and environmentally relevant. Being able to recover these materials while preserving its quality is not only economically attractive, but it can also contribute to decrease the environmental impact of electric vehicles. Disassembly can play in this regard a key rol...

The rising number of electric vehicles will lead to an increase of EV batteries reaching their end-of-life. Efforts are therefore being made to develop technologies and processes for recycling, remanufacturing and reusing EV batteries. One important and necessary step for the recycling process is the disassembly of EOL EV batteries. Unpredictable l...

A key problem in human robot collaboration is a safe movement of the robot. The reason for this lies mainly in the variety of possible different events that can occur in an unstructured environment. Especially the description of a variable working space and the movements of humans are difficult to represent deterministically. In this paper, an appr...

The paper presents investigations on a forming process, which is implemented in a forming press based on a Stewart platform. In contrast to common forming techniques, this buildup offers not only one but six degrees of freedom. This is of particular interest when it comes to the forming of materials that show significant anisotropic behaviour such...

Deposition processes, such as Wire & Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM), have important perspectives in industry, due to their capacity to produce large near-shape parts with high productivity. Beyond process-material issues, deposition path planning is one of the major challenges to allow a wide use of these processes using multi-axis machines or r...

In battery production, damage-free processing of materials and intermediate products is crucial for ensuring battery cell performance. A central step in battery production is cell assembly, in which a multitude of handling processes of electrodes is necessary. These handling processes tend to cause mechanical stress (e. g. gripping force) and parti...

The robot-assisted manufacturing is introduced for many years in automated production areas, while the production of buildings still follows the traditional manual process. Using new possibilities of digital planning the construction industry demonstrated potential for the implementation of freeform architectures, which are only possible using expe...

In industrial human-robot collaboration (HRC) the question, how can such systems be designed safely is paramount. In general, it is difficult to assess those systems with all their capabilities prior to commissioning. In this paper we propose specialized simulation tools as one potential solution to this issue. We use real-world geometrical data to...

Industry 4.0 looks at increasing the availability of data, for example, that resulting from an assembly process. This article explores the application of these concepts to a precision assembly task to maximize the yield and machine uptime. Although traditional methods focus on data resulting from assembly, this paper will look at the full scope of...

Currently, small scale manufacturing is limited to manual assembly due to high product specific costs for fully-automated production. Human robot collaboration (HRC) aims to overcome this problem with semi-automated production by incorporating sensor integrated robotics in more fields of human activity. One key aspect for industrial use of human-ro...

New tasks for industrial robots often require high stiffness or entail high reaction forces, which are currently provided by the robot structure itself. This leads to heavy and expensive robot structures: designed for the main task, but oversized for positioning and movement tasks.

A large diversity of product variants often leads to decision making problems during product and assembly process development. This paper presents a novel method that is used to quickly gather assembly characteristics of product variants for the enrichment of criteria for decision making methods and acceleration of assembly process planning. The co...

During the development of new materials for battery production the produced materials have to be evaluated. Usually several single-layer battery cells of the developed material are assembled manually and characterized electrochemically. The results depend very largely on the manual assembly where an amount of random deviations tolerances affect the...

From the absence of standardization regarding components of battery systems for electric vehicles results a large number of theoretically applicable battery configurations for a given application. This leads to decision making problems and expenditure of time during development processes. This paper presents a method that automates the electrical a...

Additive manufacturing meets the demand for highly customized and flexible production. However, the physical limitation of the material application rate causes that large volume production of such workpieces is not attractive yet. In order to push additive manufacturing towards large volume production, the impact of this limitation has to be minimi...

The industrialized winding of electrode–separator composites (ESCs; “jelly rolls”) applies bending stress to the winding mandrel. This affects the mechanical integrity of the substrate's coating and adhesion and may reduce the cycle stability and the battery life. Even though this motivates strong interest in the minimization of bending stress duri...

A major driver for competition in end-consumer markets is product individualization with regard to functionalities, shape and design. This trend calls for more flexible and versatile production systems. In anticipation of this challenge a new concept for form-flexible handling devices is proposed. It involves a vacuum system in combination with a g...

Battery electric vehicles as well as plug in hybrid electric vehicles suffer from high costs as well as low driving ranges. Both characteristics can be related to the battery system of the vehicle. In order to reduce weight within the battery system and thus enlarge the vehicle range, novel lightweight components based upon multi-material design ar...

Energy storage is one of the key technological factors that determine the success of a sustainable future. Especially green mobility concepts for electric or hybrid electric vehicles highly depend upon storage technologies with high energy density and light-weight materials. At the same time, innovative production processes should be conceived that...

The rising number of electric vehicles (EV) will eventually lead to a comparable number of EV batteries reaching their end-of-life (EOL). Efforts are therefore being made to develop technologies and processes for recycling, remanufacturing and reusing EV batteries. One important step of many such processes is the disassembly of EOL EV batteries, wh...

The increasing demand for electric vehicles and thus lithium-ion batteries results in a multitude of challenges in production technology. The reproducibility and performance of large scale batteries for automotive applications are very high. At the same time the production processes are complex and involve many uncertainties. Two essential process...

The assembly of limp, elastic or differently shaped objects poses a huge challenge which needs to be met by machine tools and the corresponding processes of handling, forming and joining. These processes are often carried out manually. This technological gap triggered the present work at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. A novel form-flexibl...

During the assembly of battery cells, handling of the single sheet electrodes is a critical task. The electrodes have to be handled with high accuracy, low mechanical loads and low chemical contamination of the electrodes as well as the production environment. Especially lifting of electrodes with state-of-the-art area vacuum grippers causes immens...

The disassembly of end-of-life products has thus far seen minimal industrial application of robotics, aside from manufacturers initiatives to refurbish their own products. Conventional robotics in manufacturing lacks the flexibility to deal with the expected small lot sizes, product deviations and failed operations due to product damage. Disassembl...

A battery separator isolates anode and cathode electrically and contributes to the ionic conductivity on the one side. On the other side, it is a highly sensitive functional component concerning mechanical loads. During production as well as the operation of a battery this thin, polymer based film is stressed by compressive and tensile forces. This...

This chapter discusses general issues of automated manipulation in medical and biotechnological lab processes. A categorization from the viewpoint of the accuracy is proposed, and relevant aspects from automation engineering are reviewed. To illustrate the discussion, a case study on colony picking is presented. This study starts with market analys...