How to make automation more flexible?

Release time:

2023-11-08

With the downstream consumer electronics, automotive electronics, medical electronics, industrial electronics and other industries from the traditional single-variety, large-scale production mode to multi-variety, small and medium-scale production mode, the producer-led production mode gradually to the consumer-led production mode, the traditional manufacturing mode is difficult to meet the flexibility and adaptability required by the modern market, the manufacturing industry is developing towards flexible manufacturing and computer integrated manufacturing with multi-variety and small batch production, and flexible assembly system is the development direction of automatic assembly in the future.

Rigid automation is primarily designed to produce individual products repeatedly and efficiently. In the past, only one or a limited variety of products were produced, and the output was large and the change was small, so this model worked well in the production floor. Because the upfront equipment costs are lower than flexible solutions, rigid automation is ideal for this type of production activity. If only a single part is produced, the yield can be optimized. However, modularity is usually not part of the original design, which means that it is often not cost-effective to convert machines and equipment to support multiple product configurations, so it is difficult to implement.

Then came the next generation of automation-programmable automation, designed to allow some degree of configurability once installed. This includes the ability to write new code to perform new operations, which of course requires manual operation of mechanical devices to perform the conversion. The disadvantage is that the conversion process is often labor intensive and requires long down time to change tools and change programming.

A more modern approach is flexible automation, where machine operators press a button and use recipe control and mechanical automation to seamlessly switch one process to another. This allows manufacturers to produce more products on the same machine, provided that the machine is designed with the ability to produce other products. Flexible devices use electromechanical automation to convert fast, repeatable processes into position control. This allows the production line to produce a wide variety of products with very little downtime.

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