Festo implements Industry 4.0 on a large scale in real-world car production

29th September 2021

     

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A leading car manufacturer has been relying on the pinpoint accuracy and efficiency of servo-pneumatic welding guns from Festo for many years. They have now installed more than 2,500 welding gun robots with this technology in the premium brand’s body shops. This car manufacturer now reduces downtimes by 25 percent thanks to a predictive maintenance system from Festo, which is ready for artificial intelligence.

Generating added-value solutions

Customer-specific solutions together with application knowledge enable agile, innovative approaches. The experience gained then provides the potential to replicate these solutions in the standard business. The challenge is to use the data from the devices and the application environment with the knowledge of the processes to deliver real added value for the end customer.

The benefits are obvious; car manufacturers can schedule repairs for welding guns during non-productive times and thus increase the availability of their plants. The status of the welding gun can be modelled in the control system. Automated repair orders and even “life cycles” for welding guns are thus easy to generate. Filter functions enable comparisons to be made. The early detection of leaks results in energy savings since energy and maintenance costs play a major role in the body shop.

Predictive maintenance

Nowadays, mechatronic system products from Festo for resistance spot welding already process a lot of data and compress it to be used as diagnostics for maintenance. But simply providing and displaying data is not enough. In future, predictive maintenance on the basis of artificial intelligence will offer additional possibilities compared to traditional condition monitoring approaches. Data from the devices will be merged with process data and evaluated using analytics models and cloud-based solutions.

The system specialists at Festo have added software to the existing system PCs of the robot cell that collects the welding gun’s diagnostic data and sends it to a collection point in the cloud. Running in the cloud is a maintenance application that visualises the data in the browser (maintenance dashboards) and evaluates it with respect to the expected service life.

The challenge of data transfer

“The first challenge here was to transfer the welding gun’s data from production to the cloud. Topics like network traffic, processor loads and data security were uncharted territory for both parties at that time,” explains Dr Jan Bredau, Head of Application Software for System Solutions at Festo.

Festo developed the hardware concept of the servo-pneumatic welding gun in close cooperation with experts from the automotive industry. This enabled Festo product developers to take many of the features required by the industry into consideration, including the reduction of the envelope because the servo-pneumatic system is considerably more compact than comparable welding actuators. Users can now install and operate the electronic and pneumatic sections of the control system either as a single unit or separately, in line with their requirements and the application. This makes the system significantly more flexible and leads to the various concepts for mounting on robots.

If linked to the factory maintenance system, “predictive” maintenance orders are triggered in their usual environment and, if desired, sent by SMS to the maintenance technician’s mobile phone.

“Now we have this complimentary offering that will enhance this solution. Festo has decades of application knowledge in sensors and actuators that we can now combine with domain and data science knowledge. This will open the door for artificial intelligence in the application,” concludes Bredau.

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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