Experiment name: BEAUTY
Manufacturing end-user: TETRA INDUSTRISERVICE GROUP
The Business Sector
The BEAUTY project address the sector of custom-design, lot-size one metal components made out of bent pipes. Those components are important in manufacturing of steel yacht or stairs railings, aluminium frames for kitesurfing etc. Currently, they are mostly manufacture using manually operated equipment, which often suffers from the repeatability and quality issues.
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The Challenge
TETRA Industriservice Group have been approached by several potential customers in search for a supplier of custom-design bent metal components. The main challenges are:
- To automate fully manual production process
- To introduce state of art automation tools at a low cost thanks to incorporation of existing equipment
- To decrease material loss caused by incorrect processing
The solution
Together both companies came with an idea for a flexible cell-based on industrial robot and standard, yet automated, machines. Such a solution can be significantly cheaper – in the range of 80k euros and offer similar quality of products. While the throughput of such a cell would be lower than that of a dedicated machine, it would not be much of an issue for starting the side business. Especially, the components of the cell can be repurposed if the market proves to be large enough to justify bigger investments.
The use of HORSE framework provides added value to the experiment in several aspects:
- The experiment focuses on customized, lot-size-one production. The use of MPMS further augmented with RFID coding of the orders significantly increases control over the whole end-to-end process from inputting the order, through manufacturing to delivery. It also contributes to increased controllability and traceability of production.
- The use of FlexBe in the role of Hybrid Task Supervisor significantly facilitates the programming of the robot for the transportation and manipulation tasks parametrized by the order specification. As a result the pipe cutting and bending solution developed within the project is more flexible and requires less effort to reprogram.
- The HORSE middleware simplifies the integration of different hardware components, including legacy PLCs. Therefore, the use of the HORSE framework allows for easy integration of modified legacy machines (band saw and bending machines) controlled via PLC with the robot controlled via FlexBe, under the overall orchestration done via MPMS.
