Braintech: Intelligent Vision

Since the introduction of the first Toyota Prius Hybrid more than a decade ago in Japan, hybrid vehicle popularity and adoption has surpassed everyone’s predictions including those of the pioneers. Many major auto manufacturers have added at least one hybrid car to their model lineup and some such as Lexus and Ford Motor now offer SUVs and larger vehicles taking advantage of the technology. By all accounts, it appears that the demand for these vehicles is on an accelerating path especially with the memory of over $4 a gallon gas prices still fresh in the psyche of the average commuter. Of recent note have been discussions regarding the conditions surrounding the automakers bailout. Many are advocating a commitment to building the fuel efficient cars of tomorrow—of which hybrids are the centerpiece—as a mandatory pre-condition to releasing such bailout funds to the “big three”.

Rapidly Growing Market

The hybrid component market is significant and growing at a rapid pace. According to NRI Research Report on Hybrid Vehicles, by 2012 the combined component market for hybrid vehicles will be in the vicinity of 760 Billion Yens (approx. $8 Billion USD). Given the excellent fuel savings resulting from hybrids, the report labels this as “value being shifted from the oil industry to the automotive industry”. Even though this is a small portion of the overall auto industry today (just over 1%) it is the fastest growing area and therefore worthy of attention by those involved in the manufacturing sector.

Added Complexity

Figure 1: Hybrid IC Engine / Generator Duo, courtesy http://www.cleangreencar.co.nz

From a manufacturing automation standpoint it is an interesting exercise to compare the design and component makeup of hybrid vehicles with their internal combustion older brethren. Examining a few engine and power train schematics, it doesn’t take long to realize that hybrids are in fact a lot more complex. Even though hybrids use electric motor(s) for propulsion, they maintain usage of an internal combustion engine (albeit a much smaller one) to charge the batteries. In other words instead of one system responsible for vehicle propulsion (the IC engine), now we have two subsystems at work. This clearly increases the component count and it may be logical to think that we would have roughly doubled the number of needed components. While this may be a good approximation, it does not mean that we have double the complexity. The overall system complexity typically grows exponentially when two or more subsystems have to work in a coordinated fashion to accomplish an overall goal.

Having driven combustion engine vehicles for generations, as consumers we are very accustomed to their driving feel and surveys show one of the major marketing requirements for hybrid vehicles has been to preserve or mimic this feel. In other words, the above internal combustion and electric propulsion subsystems have to work in perfect unison to ensure a ‘high-fidelity’ driving experience vital to the marketing success of hybrids. This coordination of course requires even further modules that did not have to exist before further increasing component count and complexity.

Typical Components & Modules

Visiting Denso’s website (an affiliate of Toyota Motor that often manufactures vehicle components for the auto giant), I was able to find no less than the following eight new components specifically manufactured for hybrid vehicles:

• Battery Monitoring Unit
• DC-DC Converter
• Integrated Starter Generator
• CO2 Air Conditioning System
• Electric Compressor
• System Main Relay
• Battery Cooling System
• High-Output Power Control Unit

Figure 2: Integrated Start Generator, photo credit: Denso Corp.

Figure 3: Battery Cooling System, photo credit: Denso Corp.

Add to this list the hybrid battery, the specialized mechanical coupling components that manage the engagement of the engine and the generator and many other supporting modules and subsystems and you can quickly see the significant rise in the number of components. What is also worth noting is that added component count not only increases the number of processes and plants that have to be involved but also the amount and complexity of assembly activities at the final assembly plant. According to the NRI report, automakers concerns regarding hybrids are two-fold: a) whether traditionally non-automotive suppliers (e.g., electrical component manufacturers) can scale their operations to deal with the rigors of the automotive industry and b) whether the automakers themselves can manage the added component count and assembly complexity while maintaining or ideally shrinking the hybrid price premium.

Opportunity to Leapfrog

Manufacturing in general and automotive manufacturing in particular have made strides in the last four decades automating many of their previously manual processes. Such processes have been proven to produce higher quality vehicles at lower costs. Most of this automation however has been limited to what is known as ‘hard automation’ whereby a specific machine is designed and integrated to perform a more or less set process. Even robots which were interestingly referred to as flexible automation did not fully deliver on this promise as they were mainly used as motion playback machines.

Throughout the present decade with efforts spearheaded by Braintech and a few other pioneering companies, the industry has witnessed an increasing fulfillment of the flexible automation promise in the form of vision guided and force guided robotic solutions.

Over the past decade at Braintech we have developed novel technologies and product in the area of vision guided robotics that can play a very positive role in helping manufacturers meet both of these challenges. At the heart of our technologies is an ability to deal with complexity and change by offering robots the ability to ‘see’, identify and locate objects.

The impact is tremendous on manufacturing processes and return on investment instant in many cases: processes can do away with expensive dunnage, fixtures, and hard automation devices; skilled labor can be redeployed to value-add operations and ergonomic injuries reduced; robots can identify part types and treat each accordingly enabling mixed batch processes; manufacturers are empowered to maintain value-add operations domestically due to lower cost of manufacturing and the list goes on.

Many hundreds of installations to date have proven the viability and economic feasibility of vision guided robotics technology under real world factory conditions. As a matter of fact, one of the only barriers to rapid adoption has been resistance to change stemming from incumbent investment into existing processes. I view the hybrid revolution as a great opportunity for manufacturers (some of whom are new to the automotive industry) to start with a clean sheet of paper and take full advantage of vision guided robotics to leapfrog the old inefficient processes.

As discussed above, hybrid vehicles are substantially more complex than plain internal combustion counterparts. The added complexity combined with the need to maintain vehicle prices close to traditionally accepted levels, poses formidable new challenges to auto makers. There are two major areas where Braintech technologies can help these firms win the battle to reduce hybrid vehicle cost while boosting quality:

• Material Handling & Assembly: all components and sub-assemblies that eventually find their way into a vehicle need to be handled at multiple points along their lifecycle. They need to be picked up and fed into various processes (e.g., machining, painting, sealing) and then packaged and shipped to the next step. The increase in component count increases demand for materials handling. Braintech’s array of object location technologies especially Single Camera 3D and the more recent Random Bin Picking technologies are perfectly suited to robotizing these operations thereby reducing capital and maintenance costs.
• Part / Assembly Inspection & Verification: if you ask any experienced engineer, he or she would tell you that more components means exponentially more chances for things to go wrong. One effective way to win the fight against added complexity with hybrid vehicles is to ensure that the same component is inspected and verified as many times as possible along the productions process. Deploying vision guided robots to handle parts and assemblies has therefore the added advantage of enabling multi-point inspection. Several technologies within Braintech’s eVisionFactory platform—most notably geometric pattern matching—allow a vision guided robot to examine each and every part it handles for presence / absence of key features, adherence to dimensional tolerances, presence of requisite sealants or adhesives or even proper surface finish before the given part is allowed to transition to the next step. It is easy to imagine that such an inspection regime when repeated multiple times along the production process would enable manufacturers to markedly reduce incidence of defects or mistakes, catching these as far upstream as possible.

It is clear to me however that this is just the beginning. As the technology becomes more sophisticated and as manufacturers gain a deeper understanding of the possibilities, entire plants—as opposed to isolated manufacturing cells—are being designed with these new capabilities in mind.

As the fastest growing sector in automotive manufacturing, the hybrid revolution is attracting many new companies to the automotive business. These companies have a distinct advantage over the traditional automotive business: they are not nearly as bound by past practices, tradition or existing capital investments. As they set their sights on this new market, they will leapfrog their competition by taking a fresh, fundamental approach to the design and implementation of their manufacturing processes. This is especially true in light of the added complexity of hybrid vehicles and the intense global competition in this area.

It would seem that Braintech with its unique and proven set of technologies and commercial product stands to play a critical role in mapping out this future.

For more information on Braintech’s suite of vision guided robotics technologies visit:
http://www.braintech.com/products-evf-vt.php

Until next time,
Babak