Robotic Systems & Assembly

1.42 million assemblies a year, twelve robots, seven components

A Tier 1 automotive supplier was running a liftgate bracket assembly on up to twelve operators loading manual presses, managing left-hand and right-hand variants across two vehicle models.

The brief was to automate the whole process, loading through packaging, and to do it with robots rather than fixed hard automation so the equipment would outlive the vehicle program it was built for.

The system runs twelve FANUC robots. Four handle precision picks from bowl feeders. Five move forgings, stampings, and assembled brackets between stations. Three take the complex work, including a tool-changer robot that packs finished brackets into bins and places the cardboard layers between them.

The hard part was not the robots. It was tolerance stack-up. The assembly involves four components, each with its own tolerance band, and in high volume they regularly arrive at their limits simultaneously. Tooling designed for nominal parts does not work on a stack built from extremes. Absorbing that full envelope of variation while holding cycle time was the central engineering problem.

1.42 million assemblies produced annually, on equipment the customer can redeploy to the next program.

A lights-out cell for aerospace structural components

An aerospace manufacturer's shot peen line processed fifteen part variants across three aircraft programs through two booths. Each cycle took several minutes, and when it finished the part waited for an operator to walk over and move it. Moving those parts took two overhead cranes working in tandem, lifting and tilting by hand.

The objective was to remove the operator dependency completely.

Three robots now handle every transfer, all of them working from below-floor pits so maintenance vehicles and people keep their access to the cell during production. The primary handler is a FANUC M-2000iA/2300, one of the largest payload robots built, on a seventh axis.

The cell runs lights-out once the incoming carts are loaded, and the overhead crane lifts are gone.