Automotive Robot Vision

Indus­tri­al robot tech­nol­o­gy has advanced steadi­ly from its start in the 1970’s, with evo­lu­tion­ary progress in char­ac­ter­is­tics like pay­load capac­i­ty, free­dom of move­ment, and tool­ing appli­ca­tions. Recent­ly, rev­o­lu­tion­ary advance­ments in robot vision have emerged. Robots that can see have begun to change how robot users do business. 

Robot vision can take sev­er­al dif­fer­ent forms and has numer­ous appli­ca­tions for all indus­tries, includ­ing the auto­mo­tive indus­try. Mobile robots can use mag­net­ic sen­sors to guide them­selves around a fac­to­ry floor, fol­low­ing a pre-set track of mag­net­ic guides attached to the floor or wall. Robots per­form­ing pick-and-place oper­a­tions can now be fit­ted with spe­cial­ized cam­eras pro­grammed to rec­og­nize spe­cif­ic shapes on a pass­ing con­vey­or. Once a pro­grammed shape is rec­og­nized, laser or ultra­son­ic sen­sors allow the robots to accu­rate­ly judge dis­tance to quick­ly han­dle objects while not run­ning into oth­er robots or equipment.

Appli­ca­tions for vision in auto­mo­tive robots are abun­dant. Mobile robots can move autonomous­ly around a fac­to­ry floor, guid­ed by mag­net­ic vision, reduc­ing or elim­i­nat­ing the need for bulky and expen­sive con­vey­ors or posi­tion­ing equip­ment. Two or three-dimen­sion­al cam­eras enable robots to pick a spe­cif­ic assigned object out of a group of many dif­fer­ent objects. This seem­ing­ly sim­ple abil­i­ty has a sig­nif­i­cant impact for fac­to­ries that can do away with the need to sep­a­rate dif­fer­ent parts onto dif­fer­ent con­vey­ors, there­by reduc­ing the space need­ed to pro­duce mul­ti­ple parts of a vehi­cle. Already ver­sa­tile robots like the Fanuc R2000ia can be tak­en to an even high­er lev­el of util­i­ty when equipped with a Fanuc V500ia 3DL laser vision sys­tem. Cam­era-equipped vision robots can also inspect auto­mo­tive objects they are han­dling, weld­ing, pol­ish­ing, or grind­ing. Using robot vision for qual­i­ty con­trol allows near­ly every unit of a prod­uct to be inspect­ed, as opposed to tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of man­u­al­ly inspect­ing only small batch­es of a prod­uct. Auto­mo­tive robot vision applied to qual­i­ty con­trol cuts cost by reduc­ing reject­ed parts and mate­r­i­al and saves expen­sive human labor from hav­ing to man­u­al­ly inspect a product. 

If you are inter­est­ed in auto­mo­tive vision robots, con­tact Robots​.com by call­ing 877−762−6881 to find out what it would take to inte­grate one on your fac­to­ry floor.