How many robots are in a automoblie factory?

The continuous development and innovation of industrial robots have put forward higher requirements for practitioners, and the imbalance between supply and demand of talents in this field is becoming increasingly prominent.

At present, the most spectacular robot production line in the world is the auto welding production line.

How many people are left in the once overcrowded car factory after years of development?How many industrial robots does a car production line have?

China’s auto industry with an annual industrial added value of $11.5 trillion

The automotive industry chain is one of the longest in the current industrial sector, with the added value of China’s automotive industry reaching 11.5 trillion yuan in 2019.During the same period, the added value of the real estate industry was only 15 trillion yuan, and the industrial added value of the home appliance market, which is closely related to us, was 1.5 trillion yuan.

This kind of comparison can you more clearly understand the huge automotive industry chain!There are even industrial practitioners to the automobile as the cornerstone of national industry, in fact, is not too much!

In the automotive industry chain, we often introduce auto parts and auto factories separately.A car factory is also what we often call an engine plant.

Automobile parts include automobile electronics, automobile interior parts, automobile seats, automobile body panels, automobile batteries, automobile wheels, automobile tires, as well as reducer, transmission gear, engine and so on, up to thousands of components.These are auto parts manufacturers.

So what are car oems actually producing?The so-called oEMS, which produce the main structure of the car, as well as the final assembly, are tested, rolled off the production line and delivered to consumers.

The automotive workshops of oEMS are mainly divided into four workshops:

We need to make a reasonable definition for automobile factories. We take the annual production capacity of 100,000 units as the standard for a single automobile factory, and we limit the production of only one model.So let’s look at the number of robots in the four major production lines of oEMS.

The stamping line in the main engine plant is the first workshop, which is when you get to the car plant, you’ll see the first workshop is very tall.That is because the first workshop installed is the punching machine, the punching machine itself is relatively large, and relatively high.Usually car capacity in 50000 units/year production line, will choose the cheaper, slightly slow hydraulic press production line, the speed of hydraulic press normally only do five times per minute, some high-end car makers or annual demand in car production line to be around 100000, will use servo press, the speed of the servo press can 11-15 times/min.

One punch line consists of 5 presses. The first one is a hydraulic press or servo press used for drawing process, and the last four are mechanical presses or servo presses (usually only rich owners will use full servo presses).

The robot of the punch line is mainly the function of feeding. The process action is relatively simple, but the difficulty lies in the fast speed and high stability.To ensure the stable operation of the stamping line, at the same time, the degree of manual intervention is low.If stable operation is not possible, then maintenance personnel must be on standby in real time.This is an outage that will fine the production line by the hour.There have been equipment vendors said shutdown for an hour 600 fine.That is the price of stability.

A punching line from the beginning to the end, there are 6 robots, according to the size and weight of the body side structure, basically will use 165kg, 2500-3000mm or so arm span of the seven-axis robot.

Under normal condition, an O&M plant with a production capacity of 100,000 units/year needs 5-6 punch lines according to different structural parts if high-end servo press is adopted.

The number of robots in a stamping shop is 30, not counting the use of robots in the storage of body stamping parts.

From the whole punching line, there is no need for people, stamping itself is a large noise, and the risk factor is relatively high work.Therefore, it has been more than 20 years for automobile side panel stamping to achieve full automation.

After the stamping of the car side cover parts, from the stamping workshop directly into the body in white assembly line welding.Some car companies will have a warehouse after stamping parts, here we do not do detailed discussion.We directly say stamping parts out into the welding line.

Welding line is the most complex process and the highest degree of automation in the whole automobile production line.The line is not where there are no people, but where people can stand.

The whole welding line process structure is very close, including spot welding, CO2 welding, stud welding, convex welding, pressing, gluing, adjustment, rolling, a total of 8 processes.

Automobile welding line process decomposition

Welding, pressing, piping, and dispensing of the entire car body in white are done by robots.

Coating production line includes electrophoresis, spraying two workshops.Painting to experience in painting, color paint spraying, varnish spraying three links.Paint itself is very harmful to the human body, so the entire coating production line is an unmanned production line.From the automation degree of a single production line, the basic realization of 100% automation.Manual work is mainly in the paint mixing link, and production line monitoring and equipment support services.

The final assembly line is the field with the most manpower in automobile factories at present. Due to the large number of assembled parts and 13 processes, many of which need to be tested, the automation degree is the lowest among the four production processes.

Automobile final assembly process: primary interior assembly — chassis assembly — secondary interior assembly –CP7 adjustment and inspection — four-wheel positioning detection — light detection — side-slip test — hub test — rain — road test — tail gas analysis test –CP8– vehicle commercialization and delivery.

Six six-axis robots are mainly used in door installation and handling.The “N” number is due to the uncertainty caused by the number of collaborative robots entering the final assembly line.Many automobile manufacturers, especially foreign brands, such as Audi, Benz and other foreign brands, began to use collaborative robots to cooperate with manual workers for the installation process of interior parts and automotive electronics.

Due to higher safety, but the price is more expensive, so many enterprises from the point of view of economic cost, or mainly use artificial assembly.Therefore, we will not count the number of cooperative robots here.

AGV transfer platform, which the final assembly line must use, is very important in assembly. Some enterprises will also use AGV robots in the stamping process, but the number is not as much as the final assembly line.Here, we only calculate the number of AGV robots in the final assembly line.

Summary: An automobile factory with an annual output of 100,000 vehicles needs 30 six-axis robots in stamping workshop and 80 six-axis robots in welding workshop for arc welding, spot welding, edge rolling, glue coating and other processes.The coating line uses 32 robots for spraying.The final assembly line uses 28 robots (including AGVs), bringing the total number of robots to 170.