Perfect Collaboration Between Automotive Parts and Collaborative Robots

01 Background

This case is about one of our clients in East China. The client is a small and medium-sized enterprise that specializes in developing and manufacturing automotive air conditioning actuators, automotive mirror actuators, automotive LED lighting equipment, and other automotive parts and accessories. With a global business presence, this client provides a good service in GM America, Shanghai GM, Beijing Hyundai, FAW, Mercedes-Benz, Dongfeng Nissan, etc.

With the business expansion and industry trends, it began to accept smaller batch and multi-variety orders, thus production problems arose. With the demographic dividend disappearing in recent years, the company also faces difficulties of employment. When it comes to the process of precision assembly, factors such as changes in personnel, the working condition of workers, and the craftsmanship of novice and skilled craftsmen all make for variation in the product, making it impossible to ensure good consistency. To this end, the company began to consider turning into automation.

02 Pain point

The complex environment and limited space on the company's workshop made it unwise to use industrial robots that require safety fence, so the client turned to cobots which are easy to integrate and require no safety fence. In the early days, most cobots were manufactured by foreign companies, and clients had purchased a few cobots and integrated them into their production lines. But imported cobots were costly. Despite the good performance, the high production costs forced the company to give it up. And in recent years, the emergence of cobots and the influx of local manufacturers into the cobots industry have brought opportunities for more similar Chinese SMEs to transform and upgrade.

03 Solution

Finally, the client chose to work with ELITE Robot, a company that specializes in cobot tracks, and adopted ELITE Robot EC63 cobot with a 3kg load, 624mm working radius and ±0.03mm repeated positioning accuracy. The pneumatic gripper is used to assemble the headlight actuator at the work station. The gripper picks up the pinion from the loading area and mounts it at a certain angle to the inside of the headlamp actuator. This requires highly stable and accurate pick & place applicational operation, and the ELITE Robot cobot made it!

In addition, cobots are suitable for flexible production and can be deployed quickly to handle small batch and multi-variety orders. Once the program is preset, when the product batch changes, the new program can be quickly called for debugging and the robot can be put into the new task, greatly reducing the line change time. As a domestic brand, ELITE Robot offers cost-effective products, lowering the automation threshold for clients with an ROI period of only 8-12 months.

This client adopted the progressive automation model recommended by ELITE Robot. The company's workshop has gradually gained an in-depth understanding of the application characteristics of cobots in advanced processes and has gradually turned to automation. It is believed that ELITE Robot's safety, ease of use, flexibility and efficiency will provide more SMEs with better automation application solutions and promote the transformation and upgrading of automation in various industries.

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