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The automatic assembly of gearboxes for automobiles has numerous benefits for the automotive industry. The flexibility it allows makes changeover between product variants easy, while quality is maintained at the highest level. Automation of the materials flow further eliminates highly strenuous work. In addition, production can be fine-tuned to exact requirements and there is no need for large inventories of assembled gearboxes and gearbox components.
ABB Robotics in Sweden, ABB Montage und Test Automation GmbH in Germany, and systems suppliers, have teamed up with two European automotive manufacturers to develop methods and systems for the automatic assembly and testing of complete gearboxes for automobiles.
FLEXIBILITY, QUALITY AND AUTOMATION
Besides lowering production costs, the assembly systems have the following advantages:
* High flexibility; different types of gearbox can be assembled in a large number of variants in the same station.
* Constantly high quality plus uniformity; only gearboxes which have been assembled and tested to the relevant standards and which function perfectly are approved for continued production.
* Highly automated assembly, achieved by means of automated materials flow and testing. Jobs which are very strenuous or hazardous are eliminated.
THREE IMPORTANT AREAS FOR EFFICIENT ASSEMBLY
The development of these large and complex assembly systems took almost two years. Special attention was paid to three important areas of technology:
* Simultaneous engineering, in which the end-user, process specialists and designers act as a team. The end-user, system suppliers, product specialists and robot engineers co-operate in searching for optimum solutions to the problems arising between the concept stage and full production. This includes reducing the cycle time. Simultaneous engineering is applied mainly to more comprehensive projects and touches on areas such as production engineering, logistics, controls, planning, service, maintenance and robotics.
* Material management, aimed at optimizing the flow of parts and products through the factory. The different material flows and storage areas are organized in such a way that parts are automatically fed to the robot cells, where they can be reliably picked up by the robot. To meet profitability requirements all the magazines must be simple to fill, whether automatically or mechanically. For manual filling the magazines must have a large storage capacity and be designed to feed parts automatically to the various assembly stations.
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