The objective of the FlexPaint project is the development of methodologies to automize painting applications for smaller lot sizes (below 10000) with a very high number of variants (more than 100 per year) at total part numbers in the range of 10000 per year.

Main issue is to find economic possibilities which can be realized under industrial return on investment (ROI) constraints, which hinder the application of the currently used conventional automation used for higher lotsizes. It is also the purpose of the FlexPaint project to find technical solutions with a significant robustness under industrial environmental conditions.

Economic objectives

The following economic objectives have been set:

• Reduce the average human programming effort for robot painting by 75%.
  The Flexpaint system should be able to automatically generate a paint program automatically for most parts.

• Reduce the still required human painting and/or supervision by 90%.
  The Flexpaint system should be able to run without human intervention or supervision.

• Reduce colour waste by more than 10%.
  The Flexpaint system should provide optimized paint strategies.

• Make automatic part painting economically efficient for total lotsizes <10000 pieces.
  The Flexpaint system should be attractive to be used by SME’s.

• Let the number of painting errors not exceed the current failure rate of the manual painting process.
  The Flexpaint system must work as good as the previous paint processes of its end-users and should decrease painting errors by 10% in the long run by guaranteeing a constant process quality.

Scientific objectives

The following scientific objectives have been set:

• Automatic generation of collision-free paint paths and robot task scheduling.
  The Flexpaint system will deliver a new model-based approach to automatically determine reasonable paint strategies.

• Open system architecture for allowing company-specific adaptations.
  The Flexpaint system will allow the end-users to incorporate their painting expertise.

• High level of applicability and acceptance for very different parts to be handled.
  The Flexpaint system will allow a broad variety of parts to be painted (from small handles to huge truck frames).

• Robustness against part changes and variations.
  The Flexpaint system will compensate small deviations in shape and size of part variants.