Automated Car Production

The auto indus­try is boom­ing like nev­er before. Already this year over 13 mil­lion cars have rolled off the lines in fac­to­ries all over the Unit­ed States. That num­ber does­n’t even include the mil­lions of cars cre­at­ed around the world. How are man­u­fac­tur­ers able to keep up with the demand of car buy­ers want­ed new mod­els every few years? The answer is sim­ple: robot automa­tion.

Auto­mat­ed robot­ic sys­tems can be used to per­form all kinds of auto­mo­tive tasks on vehi­cle frames, fend­ers and under­bod­ies, as well as oth­er parts of the vehi­cle dur­ing pro­duc­tion. While chang­ing a line to work on a dif­fer­ent car mod­el used to be tedious and slowed pro­duc­tion, auto­mat­ed robots today can be reset with­out hav­ing to be repro­grammed each time — with­out stop­ping the line, which increas­es ver­sa­til­i­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for manufacturers.

In the late 1990s and ear­ly 2000s, Chrysler start­ed robot­ic automa­tion process­es in their fac­to­ries. Almost a decade ago, in 2004, they pro­duced an unprece­dent­ed num­ber of dif­fer­ent mod­els. They were able to do this because of their auto­mat­ed robot­ic capa­bil­i­ties. Dif­fer­ent mod­els meant dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als to be han­dled and moved, dif­fer­ent sizes of mate­ri­als, etc. Chrysler was able to keep up their pro­duc­tion num­bers because of their mate­r­i­al han­dling auto­mat­ed robots. 

Hon­da has improved their ver­sa­til­i­ty as well. While Hon­da may be a Japan­ese com­pa­ny, there are fac­to­ries right here in the U.S. pro­duc­ing cars every day. Hon­da has robots that per­form tasks like spot weld­ing and paint­ing on vehi­cles, which not only increas­es their qual­i­ty of their prod­uct and enhances their pro­duc­tion speed, but also improves the safe­ty lev­els for their work­ers. An auto­mat­ed robot can do jobs like paint­ing and weld­ing that pro­duce harsh, and some­times haz­ardous, fumes and con­di­tions — keep­ing human work­ers out of har­m’s way.

Ford also jumped on the robot automa­tion train also, dump­ing $1 bil­lion dol­lars into automat­ing their 50+ year old fac­to­ry over the last decade. They also are using re-pro­gram­ma­ble robots to increase the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and ver­sa­til­i­ty of their line. Before the revamp of their fac­to­ry, it took crews at Ford 26 weeks to refit the weld­ing tow­ers, and oth­er mon­u­ments used to assem­ble a vehi­cle, to acco­mo­date even the small­est design change.

Are you involved in the auto­mo­tive or oth­er indus­try? Do you feel that your indus­try may ben­e­fit from the flex­i­bil­i­ty that auto­mat­ed robot­ics can bring? For more infor­ma­tion on automat­ing your line, con­tact Robots​.com today online or at 877−762−6881.