Fully automatic wheel assembly on cyclic and continuous flow production line

Task:

Fully automatic bolting and assembly of complete wheels to the wheel hub on continuous flow production line

Solution:

The degree of automation in the automotive industry is undoubtedly very high. The seemingly simple assembly of the wheels to the body, however, requires the highest precision and process reliability.

For this purpose, IBG has developed the world’s first fully automatic wheel assembly for continuous flow production.

The robots are equipped with two independent camera systems on the gripper. The identification of the type of wheel, position, rotational orientation and pickup height is first performed by means of a 2D camera system and software specially developed by IBG.

After gripping the wheel, the spatial position and rotational orientation of the wheel hub are detected by a 3D camera system.

The synchronous bolting of the wheels to the vehicle movement is executed with the correction values from the vision system.

System benefits:

Improved ergonomics and increased quality. A 100% inspection is carried out, which enables traceability of every single assembly process thanks to the automatic detection of torque and angle of rotation during each bolting process.