Browse Topic: Factory automation
Bosch Rexroth displayed new battery automation solutions at The Battery Show 2025 in Detroit in October, focusing on making batteries in a more efficient manner. The company's customizable conveyance system can now add the ctrlX Flow HS linear motion system and the ctrlX Flow 6D contactless transport system to move components, promising new options in an era when everyone and their suppliers are looking for ways to make better EVs. Andreas Letsch, director of the Battery Factory Automation Center of Competence at Bosch Rexroth AG, told SAE Media that the new additions can make a modern battery plant more efficient as its footprint shrinks. Used with the company's Cartesian multi-axis systems, the new systems offer improved ways to position components and handle tasks. The multi-axis cobots can effectively shift workspace vertically - they need less floor space than traditional 6-axis robot arms - providing another important factor in an efficient facility.
Over the past 25 years, the heavy fabrication and construction equipment industry has experienced significant transformation. Driven by a global surge in demand for construction machinery, manufacturers are under increasing pressure to deliver higher volumes within shorter timelines and at competitive costs. This demand surge has been compounded by workforce-related challenges, including a declining interest among the new generation in acquiring traditional manufacturing skills such as welding, heat treatment, and painting. Furthermore, the industry faces difficulties in staffing third-shift operations, which are essential to meet production targets. The adoption of automation technologies in heavy fabrication and construction equipment manufacturing has been gradual and often hindered by legacy product designs that were optimized for conventional manufacturing methods. As the industry transitions toward smart, connected manufacturing environments under the industry 4.0 paradigm, it becomes imperative to re-evaluate existing design and production strategies. This paper aims to establish a framework for aligning product and process design with emerging automation capabilities and strategic business objectives. It advocates for a design-for-automation approach, wherein components are engineered to be compatible with robotic handling, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), conveyors, and other intelligent systems. By doing so, manufacturers can enhance operational efficiency, improve safety and reliability, and reduce time-to-market for new products.
Despite a slight drop in the installations of factory robots in 2024, the push to automate automotive and other manufacturing was carrying momentum into fiscal 2025 and could benefit from U.S. federal priorities, said Jane Heffner, vice president of the International Federation of Robotics, at an industry expo in Detroit. Heffner, also the VP of sales for Teradyne Robotics, said the outlook for 2025 is strong, based on orders in Q4 of 2024. “We're seeing a double-digit increase in order intake from Q4 to Q1 of 2025,” she said. She acknowledged the global economic uncertainty but said the “interest in moving forward is still there.” She delivered her remarks at Automate 2025, the Association for Advancing Automation's annual expo, held this year in downtown Detroit.
Dufour Aerospace designs and manufactures an automated tilt-wing aircraft for critical cargo delivery missions. Emphasizing operational efficiency, the platform integrates path generation and tracking techniques tailored for the unique dynamics of tilt-wing flight and builds upon the existing lower level control. While there exist a myriad of methods for high-level aircraft automation ranging from PID to MPC, they often require a trade-off between complexity and the capability to handle non-linear dynamics of the system they are controlling. Hence, a lightweight, deterministic geometric path generation approach using clothoid-based transitions between three waypoints and a robust SO(3)- based path tracking controller adapted for tilt-wing dynamics are presented. Additionally, a high-level automation framework is introduced that includes failure mode handling for GNSS loss and communication breakdowns. This system ensures mission continuity and operational safety while supporting flexible mission planning. The methods are validated through extensive flight testing on both small and large-scale aircraft. The latter prove the scalability, safety, and reliability of the presented solution for tilt-wing aircraft automation and enhance the aircraft's capabilities in real-world emergency response and complex operational scenarios.
When we last heard from MELD Manufacturing, the large-scale 3D printer supplier was taking first place in the Robotics/Automation/Manufacturing category at the 2018 .
Advanced two-dimensional materials discovered in the last two decades are now being produced at scale and are contributing to a wide range of performance enhancements in engineering applications. The most well known of these novel materials is graphene, a nearly transparent nanomaterial comprising a single layer of bonded carbon atoms. In relative terms, it has the highest level of heat and electrical conductivity, protects against ultraviolet rays, and is the strongest material ever measured. These properties have made graphene an attractive potential material for a variety of applications, particularly for transportation-related uses, and especially for aerospace engineering. The goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and creating a world that achieves net-zero emissions have prioritized the electrification of transportation, the decarbonization of industry, and the development of products that require less energy to make, last longer, and are fully recyclable. These aspects have driven the need for new, innovative materials like graphene. While this chapter reviews the current state of graphene-related aerospace applications, it also identifies the technological challenges facing engineers that look to benefit from graphene’s attractive properties.
The Autoclave processing is commonly used in manufacturing high-performance fibre-reinforced thermoset composite components in the aerospace industry. Variations in the cure cycle, sometimes even apparently minor deviations from the prescribed cure cycle, can harm the laminate properties. Given the costly and time-consuming autoclave manufacturing process, there is a strong need to cure the maximum number of parts in the shortest possible time without compromising quality. In order to achieve high-rate automated manufacturing with the optimized autoclave process, it is important to construct a digital twin modelling approach to mirror the physical composite curing process in the virtual domain based on the integration of high-fidelity multi-physics models. The resulting digital twin includes a thermal CFD model, a thermo-chemo-mechanical module, and an efficient and accurate block coupling between these two modules. The customized Abaqus driven by local and spatial variation of the turbulence-induced heat transfer coefficient (HTC) imposed through one-way coupling determines the thermo-mechanical response in composite parts. Using the developed digital twin tool (SMARTCLAVE), HTC's spatial and temporal variation can be generated digitally without invoking an expensive and time-consuming experimental approach. The predicted local boundary conditions are used in SMARTCLAVE to determine the cure kinetics, temperature distribution, and thermal-mechanical response that drives the residual stress and distortion of composite parts after curing. The accuracy of the digital twin for autoclaving is demonstrated first using a benchmark problem followed by the capability demonstration with a single-part L-beam assembly. The benefits of using the digital twin tool are illustrated via the optimal placement of multiple parts in an autoclave to balance the throughput and quality.
Additive manufacturing (AM) is currently being used to produce many aerospace components, with its inherent design flexibility enabling an array of unique and novel possibilities. But, in order to grow the application space of polymer AM, the industry has to provide an offering with improved mechanical properties. Several entities are working toward introducing continuous fibers embedded into either a thermoplastic or thermoset resin system. This approach can enable significant improvement in mechanical properties and could be what is needed to open new and exciting applications within the aerospace industry. However, as the technology begins to mature, there are a couple of unsettled issues that are beginning to come to light. The most common question raised is whether composite AM can achieve the performance of traditional composite manufacturing. If AM cannot reach this level, is there enough application potential to warrant the development investment? The answers are highly dependent on the individual processors and will require significant research. Yet, there are still other common challenges that are not isolated to a singular processor. The focuses of this chapter are the capability to design and provide robust structural analysis for continuous fiber-reinforced polymer AM—two unsung aspects that can make or break this new technology as it finds its way into the aerospace market. These two unsettled issues, out of many, may require fundamental changes to the design, analysis, and manufacturing process. Without solutions to them, adoption by the aerospace industry will be limited to point design applications, thus constraining the technology to being nothing more than a specialized tool.
As manufacturing automation rapidly advances, conveyors are not only being used for transportation but also accurate material (or product) placement. They are often required to deliver product to a precise location consistently. When transporting product by conveyor, equipment choice will greatly impact the system’s ability to reliably deliver to a target position — either stationary (indexing) or dynamic in nature. This article explores some common conveyor types and compares the ranges of positional accuracy you might expect with each type.
Traditional robotics has been supported mainly by the automotive industry, so the performance of these devices was adapted to the needs of transportation manufacturers. Envisioning smaller and more lightweight robotics, designers realized that cobots could be used for millions of assembly tasks now being carried out by humans. Following traditional thinking, every cobot in use today is based on electric motors and drives. Something new is on the horizon, however: a cobot based on pneumatic technology that will change the paradigm of a cobot itself and open the door to new ways of thinking about robotic design. Pneumatics will simplify components and make it easy to operate these collaborative units.
The field of parallel kinematics was viewed as being potentially transformational in manufacturing, having multiple potential advantages over conventional serial machine tools and robots. However, the technology never quite achieved market penetration or broad success envisaged. Yet, many of the inherent advantages still exist in terms of stiffness, force capability, and flexibility when compared to more conventional machine structures. Deployment of Parallel Kinematic Machines in Manufacturing examines why parallel kinematic machines have not lived up to original excitement and market interest and what needs to be done to rekindle that interest. A number of key questions and issues need to be explored to advance the technology further. Click here to access the full SAE EDGETM Research Report portfolio.
There’s no doubt that Industrial Ethernet (IE) is paving the way for the automated factory of the future. IE is the backbone of modern industrial communications between devices on the plant floor, the enterprise information network, and the cloud services that companies increasingly rely upon to build and grow their business. At the macro level, IE is as essential to automation control as the internet is to e-commerce.
Manufacturing automation is now well into the Industry 4.0 era. New machine control and drive technologies are rapidly being introduced to provide more flexibility and productivity as well as smarter, more sophisticated use of real-time, actionable data on machine performance.
The manufacturing facilities of the future will deploy extremely easy-to-use, safe, flexible, and affordable automation supported by AI and standardized software and hardware interfaces. In several key respects, the transformative technologies required to make all this happen are already here, driven by demand from within the manufacturing sector itself. These technologies provide a tantalizing glimpse into the future of manufacturing automation.
ABSTRACT Gas metal arc pulse directed energy deposition (GMA-P DED) offers large-scale additive manufacturing (AM) capabilities and lower cost systems compared to laser or electron beam DED. These advantages position GMA-DED as a promising manufacturing process for widespread industrial adoption. To enable this “digital” manufacturing of a component from a computer-aided design (CAD) file, a computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) solver is necessary to generate build plans and utilize welding parameter sets based on feature and application requirements. Scalable and robot-agnostic computer-aided robotics (CAR) software is therefore essential to provide automated toolpath generation. This work establishes the use of Autodesk PowerMill Ultimate software as a CAM/CAR solution for arc-based DED processes across robot manufacturers. Preferred aluminum GMA-P DED welding parameters were developed for single-pass wide “walls” and multi-pass wide “blocks” that can be configured to build a wide range of features and components from ER5183. These parameters were incorporated into Autodesk PowerMill Ultimate to create several representative builds using GMA-DED of ER5183 with an 8-axis OTC Daihen GMA robot cell. Citation: Canaday, J., Harwig, D.D., and Carney, M. “Robotic GMA-P DED AM Build Technology for Aluminum Vehicle Structures”, In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS), NDIA, Novi, MI, Aug. 13-15, 2021.
ABSTRACT The University of Delaware (UD) and the US Army DEVCOM-GVSC (GVSC) have partnered to show the feasibility of fabricating mission specific, man-packable, autonomous vehicles that are created by Computer Aided Design (CAD) and are then produced, from start-to-finish, in a single manufacturing unit-cell without human intervention in the manufacturing process. This unit-cell contains many manufacturing processes (e.g., additive manufacturing (AM), pick-and-place, circuit printing, and subtractive manufacturing) that work in concert to fabricate functional devices. Together, UD and GVSC have developed the very first mission specific autonomous vehicle that is fully fabricated in a single manufacturing unit-cell without being touched by human hand. Citation: Jacob W. Robinson, Thomas W. Lum, Zachary J. Larimore, Matthew P. Ludkey, Larry (LJ) R. Holmes, Jr. “AUTOMATED MANUFACTURING FOR AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS SOLUTIONS (AMASS)”, In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS), NDIA, Novi, MI, Aug. 13-15, 2019.
Composite materials for aerospace & defense continue on a path of market growth fueled by tightening environmental and economic targets. This trend is occurring alongside rapid innovations in design, manufacturing, automation and cost reduction. Although slowed by the global pandemic, the increasing role of composites for many industries is, in fact, a foregone conclusion. More and more, composites performance-expressed in the elegant functionality of a curved wingtip on an airliner or in the fewer, thinner, winding fan blades of a GE9X engine-demonstrate an accelerating freedom-of-form and utility that makes composites essential to the future.
This paper presents a machine learning application of the force/torque sensor in a human-robot collaborative manufacturing scenario. The purpose is to simplify the programming for physical interactions between the human operators and industrial robots in a hybrid manufacturing cell which combines several robotic applications, such as parts manipulation, assembly, sealing and painting, etc. A multiclass classifier using Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) is first introduced in a robotic application for discriminating five different contact states w.r.t. the force/torque data. A systematic approach to train machine-learning based classifiers is presented, thus opens a door for enabling LightGBM with robotic data process. The total task time is reduced largely because force transitions can be detected on-the-fly. Experiments on an ABB force sensor and an industrial robot demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.
Imaging lenses used in many industrial machine vision applications have special requirements beyond those of standard imaging lenses. The lenses used in factory automation, robotics, and industrial inspection have to work in specific and demanding environments, which could involve vibrations, shocks, temperature changes, and contaminants. Because of these environmental requirements, new classes of ruggedized lenses are being designed specifically to work in a multitude of different scenarios, therefore creating different types of ruggedization. There are three distinct types of ruggedization available: industrial ruggedization, ingress protection ruggedization, and stability ruggedization.
Gaps in composite structures are a risky factor in aeronautical assemblies. For mechanically joined composite components, the geometrical conformance of the part can be problematic due to undesired or unknown re-distribution of loads within a composite component, with these unknowns being potentially destructive. To prevent unnecessary preloading of a metallic structure, and the possibility of cracking and delamination in a composite structure, it is important to measure all gaps and then shim any gaps greater than 127 microns. A strategy to overcome the high relative tolerances for assemblies lies in the automated manufacturing of shims for the gaps previously predicted through the evaluation of their volumes via a simulation tool. This paper deals with the development of a special end-effector prototype to enable the shimming of gaps in composites structures using a pre-processed geometry. The aim of this end-effector is to provide movement to a temperature controlled hot-end in order to generate a solid shim of ABS on the target composite surface. This process is defined according to the trajectories and velocities marked by the 3D printing process using standard G-code. The geometry and material volume to be printed are indicated by the simulated gap volume which is based on previous metrological measurements. The final objective will be to attach this end-effector to an anthropomorphic robot to enable autonomous manufacturing. This work is part of the EU FP7 funded LOCOMACHS project, under grant agreement n°314003.
This paper presents a full automated solution that uses robots for manufacturing business jets primary parts. The purpose of this technological innovation is to increase productivity, improve the quality of final product, reduce costs with maintenance and consumable materials, in addition to meeting the requirements of ergonomics, occupational health and safety. So, better results have been sought in terms of process efficiency and technological innovation aligned to competitive market requirements related to industrial automation. The aim is to improve the manufacturing processes of the furniture parts, striving for excellence in every step by further adding value and reducing wastes in order to reduce manufacturing costs and enable greater customer satisfaction.
Linear motion systems are found inside countless machines including precision laser cutting systems, laboratory automation equipment, semiconductor fabrication machines, CNC machines, factory automation, and many others too numerous to list. They range from the relatively simple such as an inexpensive seat actuator in a passenger vehicle, to a complex, multi-axis coordinate system complete with control and drive electronics for closed-loop positioning. No matter how simple or complex the linear motion system, at the most basic level, they all have one thing in common: moving a load through a linear distance in a specific amount of time.
This paper discusses an energy efficient compressed air system at an industrial automation components manufacturing facility. The authors performed and energy assessment as part of the DOE's Industrial Assessment Center program and followed up with additional investigations on the compressed air system. The compressed air system utilizes an outlet pressure transducer to a microcontroller to adjust system capacity by changing motor speed and modulating an electric proportional inlet valve. This control system allows reduced modulation of operating pressure and a lower operating set point, when compared to either system alone, and avoids thermal overloads when the VFD attempts to operate at low frequencies. The control system will be examined and discussed with respect to operation, energy savings, installation costs, and payback.
The demands on future mobility concepts for private transport will be determined by three major trends: climate change, urbanization and demographic change. These trends also provide the basis for three main development goals: “zero emissions”, “intelligent mobility” and “zero accidents”. In combination with intelligent traffic concepts and driver assistance functions, electric mobility will make a vital contribution to implementing these goals. To nevertheless keep individual mobility affordable and safe, the complexity of the electrical/electronic architecture (E/E architecture) of today's vehicles must be significantly reduced. It must advance along the steps that avionics and industrial automation already took more than 20 years ago, i.e. it must adopt the structures and methods of modern information and communication technologies (ICT). The text below describes the motivation and idea for future E/E architectures and the potential which arises from changing them significantly. The RACE research project (Robust and Reliant Automotive Computing Environment), which was started in January 2012, is also introduced. Its goal is to develop a first prototype for such an E/E architecture.
A side-effect of the continuing globalization is that manufacturing is more and more becoming a commodity. The manufacturing industry has to respond to rapidly changing markets more often and much faster than ever before while maintaining equivalent or better quality. The Automated Manufacturing System has been widely accepted as an enabling technology to respond quickly to the market changes and to improve the quality and operational efficiency of production. In this context, wireless sensors carry several advantages compared to traditional wired sensors in creating highly reliable shop floor control system, including self-organizing, self-healing, auto-routing, and self-controlling. This paper presents an agent-based simulation test bed to assist the system designer at each stage of development of wireless sensor based shop floor control systems. The proposed test bed exploits virtual factory approach in order to enhance the design and development process. Virtual Factory allows system designer to self-experience on the systems without the need to work in actual industry.
Autonomous guided vehicles, called AGVs, are important components of factory automation and manufacture system integration that requires both technical and management skills. In this paper, an AGV prototype equipped with IR detectors and IR range sensors is programming to follow a route line on the floor and avoid some obstacles on the way. The motion of the experimental AGV is promote by two DC motor with build-in gearbox, working with simultaneous PWM control in closed-loop operation. This AGV is designed to operate in environments such as offices and shop floor, in order to carry light loads on flat surfaces and ramps with positive and negative inclination. Simulations tests with ADAMS® are compared with some experimental results in order to validate the model and the prototype approaches.
The NASA Langley Research Center fiber placement facility has proven to be a valuable asset for obtaining data, experience, and insights into the automated fabrication of high performance composites. The facility consists of two automated devices: an Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) robotic arm with a modified heated head capable of hot gas and focused infrared heating and a 7' x 17' gantry containing a feeder head, rotating platform, focused infrared lamp and e-beam gun. While uncured thermoset tow and tape, e.g., epoxy and cyanate prepreg, can be placed with a robot, the placement facility's most powerful attribute is the ability to place thermoplastic and ebeam curable material to net shape. In recent years, ribbonizing techniques have been developed to make high quality thermoplastic and thermoset dry material forms to the standards required for robotic placement. A variety of composites have been fabricated from these ribbons by heated head tow and tape placement including both flat plates and cylinders. Composite mechanical property values of the former were between 85 and 100 percent of those obtained by hand lay-up/autoclave processing.
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