Manufacturing 2010

Automotive Industries, August, 2001 by Gerry Kobe

These new manufacturing technologies will change the face of the factory floor forever.

In the history of automaking, there has never been reason to believe that the basic building blocks of a factory floor would change dramatically over any 10-year period. Now there is. The push for fuel economy, quality, low-cost and niche vehicles has converged on an industry tooled for high-volume production of "more-of-the-same" products.

In this decade, the push for fuel economy will introduce more light-weight materials like aluminum and composites to the assembly line, and with that comes the necessary technologies to join them together. Quality improvement will drive a dramatic increase in the use of robotics as well as modifications and upgrades to the controls of existing robots. Vision systems will expand the universe of robotic tasks. High accuracy automation will replace existing lines, but will offer more range and have the ability to be upgraded via software. The capital-intensive side of equipment will no longer be disposable.

Niche products will force issues such as line flexibility, but will also bring low-volume manufacturing methods such as sheet hydroforming and laser blanking and cutting into the mainstream.

At the same time the factory floor changes, tool making and tool maintenance are going through a major shift. Rapid tooling production is a key to dramatically reduced vehicle development time, which directly affects cost. To compliment the rapid manufacture of tooling, automakers will adopt a "functional build" philosophy to minimize die tryouts and further reduce cost.

Reduced tool maintenance is being addressed through the use of more durable dies and molds, as well as, reformulated resins and unconventional coatings that will prolong tool life. More durable cutting tools are also a priority because the success of high-speed machining has been hamstrung by machines that are faster than tools.

Lastly, in the next decade hydraulic machines will practically vanish from factory floors, giving way to cleaner and more efficient electronic units. Uptime, reliability and throughput will be a mandate for any new equipment because in the current factory model there are inherent inefficiencies caused by machines not operating to spec.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the plant of the future is that it's a relatively quiet revolution. While modular assembly, the five-day car, world cars, etc., are getting the headlines, technologies are -- and will be -- supporting conventional manufacturing philosophies.

The latest approaches by domestic manufacturers such as General Motors Corp.'s Global Manufacturing System (GMS) and the Ford Production System (FPS) are admittedly inspired by the venerable Toyota Production System, which has stood unchallenged as the most effective, approach to automaking -- and will continue to lead.

Even Toyota adopts technologies that support its mantra of continuous improvement. The following are the products and processes that will guide the auto industry through 2010 and beyond.

ROBOTICS/FLEXIBLE FIXTURES

Robotics has proven to be one of the industry's most reliable workhorses and best bets for future growth. Industry-wide uptime for robots is in the 99.95 percent range, and easier programming and simpler diagnostics are making them more user friendly. Beyond their current trend toward ease-of-use, a new breed of intelligent robots with a combination of vision systems, sensors and sophisticated control algorithms can now perform functions that were previously impossible.

"Right now there are only a few of these kinds of robots in the world," says Ranganath Misra, product manager for intelligent robots at Fanuc Robotics. "I know of only one running in production in the U.S., and a few in the development labs. There might be a half dozen in Japan."

A typical application for these robots might be for picking large parts like engine blocks that are piled in a container. The robots are able to move into the container, deter-mine the location and orientation of a parts, which parts overlap others and then carefully extract them.

"This resolves serious ergonomic issues," Misra says. "I look at all the possible uses for this technology and the number of robots has the potential to grow into the hundreds."

Robots are also the enabling technology behind flexible fixturing, an overused term that has been applied to everything from multiple fixtures to tooltrays. In its grandest form, flexible fixturing is the generic name for a system like Nissan's Intelligent Body Assembly System (IBAS), which is a reconfigurable framing station at its Smyrna, Tenn., facility.

IBAS is made up of a complex series of programmable robots that allows dissimilar vehicles to be framed in the same station at the push of a button. It can also make changes on the fly to compensate for tolerances that may be drifting out of spec. But the stysem's biggest advantage comes at model changeover because it eliminates tooling changes.