August 30, 2005

Science is Cool: Robots At The Tipping Point

Also on "Autoline Detroit", McElroy interviewed Chrysler Executive VP for Manufacturing,Frank Ewasyshyn. Chrysler has developed a way to replace thededicated tooling in their old body shop with new, stronger robots.This eliminates much of the capital cost from dedicated tooling andallows one assembly line the flexibility to manufacturer multiplemodels of cars.

The old body shop had hard tooling, including jigs and large turntables, in fixed places on the assembly line to "frame up" large metal pieces, and then dedicated robotic weld guns to assemble them into car bodies. The assembly line needed a sperate set of hard tooling for each type of car being assembled.

According to Ewasyshyn, over the last five years commodity industrial robots have increased their lift and hold capability from 250-300 kg up to 500-700 kg. Once the commodity robots were strong enough, they could be used in revolutionary new ways.

Two cooperating robots are now strong enough to "frame up" large metal pieces and other robots can do the other elements of the assembly. Commodity robots can lift, hold, weld, glue, and fully assemble the car body, eliminating the need for fixed hard tooling in the body shop.

Because these robots are not dedicated to any particular model of car, they can switch from car model to car model with each different part, or in manufacturing lingo, these manufacturing cells have "a lot size of 1". Chrysler is retooling a plant that currently only makes one kind of car so that it will be able to build three different types of cars in full production volume and one "pilot" model in development volume.

As Exec VP Frank Ewasyshyn puts it,

"This process really uses equipment that's become a commodity. The robots have gotten to the point, and I know the robot industry hates hearing this but, they have really developed this to the point that it's an off the self technology. It's highly reliable, it's highly flexible, the prices have come down significantly, so that (the robot) becomes the commodity."

Ewasyshyn describes how this system was put together,

"So what's happened is that you basically go to, for lack of a better term, the Home Depot of the automotive industry, picking out the parts you need, and putting them together. We don't have the issues we had before. We're not creating anything new. We're using it (existing robots) in a different way. It's not an invention. It's a revolution of what's available in the market today."

These robots are an example of how small change in capability can lead to a large change in outcome. Robots getting stronger was an evolutionary step. Replacing hard tooling is a revolutionary outcome. For the automotive industry, once commodity robots had the strength to handle all the parts of a car body, they reached a "tipping point" and could radially increase the flexibility of the factory.

This process reminds me of the revolution in open source software. Programmers can take existing open source modules and assemble them to quickly create new pieces of software. Chrysler is taking existing commodity robots and using them to quickly assemble new kinds of cars.

For his work at Chrysler, Frank Ewasyshyn won the prestigious 2005 Wu Manufacturing Leadership Award, for advancement's in manufacturing.

Posted by georgegmacdonald at August 30, 2005 11:58 AM