UR's Machine Tending Kit Saves Schaeffler $150,000 per Year
In South Carolina, two Schaeffler Group USA factories produce high-precision engine components and industrial products. Like many manufacturers, Schaeffler was recently looking to automate manual assembly lines and improve labor utilization and productivity. That's when the company turned to Universal Robots' ActiNav machine tending kit.
The Schaeffler Group is a global automotive and industrial supplier that manufactures high-precision components and systems for engine, transmission and chassis applications as well as rolling and plain bearing solutions for a wide range of industrial applications. Headquartered on a 60-acre campus in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the manufacturer recently automated its assembly lines with Universal Robots' machine tending kit, ActiNav.
Universal Robots' ActiNav combines a 3D sensor with a UR5e cobot to pick and place parts on a conveyor with the proper orientation.
The ActiNav system picks complex components jumbled together in bins and places them in precise orientation on an automated conveyor for assembly. This reduces manual labor for a repetitive, hard-to-staff job; delivers an immediate 7% boost in productivity due to the robot's consistent, round-the-clock dependability; and saves the company $150,000 per year.
The Challenge
Within the Cheraw, South Carolina facility, four operators feed 24/7 manufacturing lines to build a variable cam timer (VCT) component that improves performance and reduces emissions in internal combustion engines. The work is repetitive and boring, making it hard to staff. In addition, because these lines are far from other equipment, workers can't easily be utilized in other areas, and if they leave the line for breaks or other reasons, production halts.
VIDEO: ActiNav Machine Tending Delivers Fast Savings and Improvements in Productivity
Schaeffler's special machinery group, called Sondermaschinenbau (SMB), develops and builds special equipment to extend automation within Schaeffler facilities, as well as for outside customers. The production line asked SMB for a solution that would improve employee utilization, efficiency, and costs.
Automating the machine loading on the line proved challenging, however. The component is produced by an outside supplier and delivered in bulk, and the complex geometries of the component must be accurately oriented onto a conveyor for the next process. Having the parts delivered in oriented trays for traditional automated machine tending would have added too much cost.
The Solution
A key advantage of the ActiNav system is its ability to autonomously pick parts that are randomly oriented in a bin and accurately place them.
An operator at Schaeffler dumps parts into randomized bins, giving ActiNav about 2 hours of work without human intervention.
On the new ActiNav station, an operator now simply dumps components into multiple bins and then moves to another process. ActiNav's 3D sensor scans the bin so the system can calculate appropriate picks for the UR cobot, which then places the part based on its orientation. If the part is face up, the robot places it directly on the conveyor. If the part is face down, the robot places it in a reorientation station, where it is flipped so the robot can repick it and place it accurately on the conveyor, easily meeting the line's 12-second cycle time requirement.
Once the parts are placed, the conveyor transfers the parts to the next cell. If there are no more parts to be picked from the bin, the system triggers the UR5e robot to initiate a bin-change sequence so it can continue to pick from the next bin, with no operator intervention needed.
Aman Bhave, Schaeffler mechanical design engineer, came into the project with limited robotic experience, but he was able to integrate the ActiNav system easily.
The Results
The ActiNav system delivered immediate results by reducing labor requirements from four operators on the line to three, with the freed-up operator being moved to higher-precision tasks on another line. That's provided an immediate annual savings of $150,000, which leads to a return on investment (ROI) of less than a year.
By automating the process, Schaeffler has eliminated downtime and labor underutilization and boosted overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) on the line, with production efficiency improving by seven percent.
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