







The automotive sector continues to be one of the largest customers of industrial robots in the manufacturing process. Some of these robotic advancements could actually not only make it cheaper for manufacturers but also make the total cost of ownership lower for consumers. Examples from two companies - Kuka Robotics & Universal Robotics - in delivering a more efficient process to a previously manual car seat manufacturing, stitching, screwing & assembly process.

Kuka Robotics has used robots to automate the car seat assembly for BMW that was previously done manually. The challenges of BMW’s process meant that only a six axis jointed robot could be used in the manufacturing process. The Kuka KR 30 robot was used to help stitch leather covers for the BMW 7 Series. After the seat covers are placed manually on the robotic cell, an optical scanning process transfers the colors & details to the robot controller. Then the KR 30 is able to pass the thread the through the eye of the needle, continue to thread the entire the seat including two dimensional seams and folds.

The components of the supply include the KUKA KR 30 robot, PC-based KUKA robot controller, sewing head, conveyor system with eleven workpiece carriers, thread changing systems, folder blades & a PLC.

Meanwhile, the Denmark based Universal Robot also helped Lear Corp’s factory in Germany automate a previously manual seat screwing & rest frames process. The UR 5 also has 6 rotating joints, weighs about 40 pounds & can lift 11 pounds. The robot works in a 3 shift operation & completes about 8500 screwing actions per day. The system which costed about USD 50,000 paid itself back in a few months.

The UR5 is installed above the conveyor belt & must detect within a 50 x 50 grid on where the manual pre-screw was done. Once the seat & screw is detected, it tightens the screw by up to 35 newton metres at a pre-determined angle. The exact identification of the manual done screw is done through a patented flex vision image processing system. The robot itself can be set up within 30 minutes & the GUI is based on top of Linux operating system.