The Challenge
The technical capabilities of robotic welding are well defined over decades of service in high-volume manufacturing industries such as the Automotive sector. From an operational perspective, automation is well suited to this high-volume environment; an initial heavy investment on capital and engineering to enable a system to carry out one specific task reliably and repeatedly, is easily justified as it will result in years of service and thousands, or millions, of units, and efficiencies of up to 85%.
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However this economy of scale does not transfer to high-mix low-volume operations, where production demands drive regular task changes of the robotic welding system, with every change coming with a cost. Rather than a onetime investment delivering long-term value, instead, continuous impacts and overheads driven by changing production demand will often result in automation being deemed not cost-effective and unviable.
The pre-production process of introducing a new product to robotic welding is long and arduous
Costs and Impacts of Change
Jigs and Fixtures
Robotic Welding Programming and Engineering
Robot Downtime
Change-over Overheads
Long Lead Times
Skilled Staff Recruitment and Retention
Robotic Welding in High Volume =
Capacity
+
Production Costs
= Viable Solution
Robotic Welding in Low Volume =
Production Costs
+
Capacity
= Unviable Solution
The challenge being addressed by project ACCESS is to make robotic welding technologies cost-effective in-mix low-volume welding, increase uptimes, and in turn release production capacity and ease the impacts of recruitment and retention due to the low availability of skilled labour.
Jig Design
Jig Build
Offline Programming
Online Debug