During the first half of 2021, about 1.4 million new vehicles were registered in Germany, says the Association of the Automotive Industry. Ever since Henry Ford first introduced assembly line production for the Model T, the basic principles of auto making have hardly changed: Car assembly is separated into a succession of individual steps, with each person on the line responsible for a specific task.
Robot have been helping with physically demanding chores for a long time and now perform most of the grunt work: Welding, soldering, pressing, flanging, gluing, riveting, screwing – all the processes that hundreds of metal parts undergo after they leave the pressing plant.
Many of the welding facilities deployed for these processes come from systems integration company Robolution. They are used e.g. for arc welding in assembly of seating or chassis components, but also for automated testing, joining and other handling jobs – the latter are usually follow-up tasks to the actual welding, but they can also be stand-alone procedures.
Robolution works with robots from four different manufacturers
Robolution primarily installs robots by ABB, Fanuc, Kuka and Yaskawa in its facilities. Until now, the greatest challenge for Robolution was to teach the respective welding fixtures to the robot system. “To ensure that our welding devices and their fixtures – torches, supports, etc. – can work hand in hand with the respective robot systems, we either had to use different systems for simulation and programming or teach the robots manually”, says Marco Boywitt, Simulation Technician at Robolution, in describing the problem.
Seeking to resolve this dilemma, Boywitt once again turned to IT consulting and software provider CENIT: Robolution and CENIT have been collaborating ever since the automation company was established. “Robolution and CENIT have a long-standing partnership”, says Boywitt. “For example, we pooled our practical and technology experience to develop and test synchronous and asynchronous robot applications.”
