ABB: Transforming China's manufacturing industry with robots

As early as 2006, ABB Group selected Shanghai for its global robotics business headquarters. It is an uncommon decision for large multinational companies to set up the headquarters of the high-end equipment manufacturing industry in China, which shows that ABB is optimistic about the prospect of China's industrial robot application market and its early deployment.

China's robot market with blowout demand

“The application of industrial robots in China has maintained rapid growth. From 2008 to 2013, the sales of industrial robots in China increased by an average of 36%. Only In 2013, 36,560 industrial robots, that is, one-fifth of the global sales in that year, were sold to China, an increase of 59% over 2012, and China has thus become the world's largest industrial robot market. In 2014, China The market is expected to sell more than 50,000 units." Li Gang, Vice President of ABB (China) Co., Ltd. and President of ABB Robotics Business China, introduced to "CEConline".

Interactive topic: robot, choose foreign or domestic suppliers?

As the most intuitive and effective form of realizing industrial automation by "replacing people with machines", industrial robots have not stopped since the first industrial robot Unimate appeared on the production line of General Motors in the United States in 1961. In the first decades of development, it was mainly used in the field of automobile production that required high production line efficiency, reliability, and safety. When industrial robots entered China in the 1980s and 1990s, they were mainly used in the automotive industry, because in most industries, the inexhaustible labor force made the introduction of robots less necessary.

"But since the beginning of the new century, China's economic situation has changed. A notable feature is the rise in labor costs and the decline in supply. At the same time, the working population's attention to occupational health and safety is also Continue to strengthen." Li Gang pointed out, "How to free the labor force from simple, boring, and repetitive labor and engage in more valuable work is a problem that manufacturing companies and we are considering." "Compared to labor, robots are It can complete some tasks that humans are not suitable or unwilling to do, such as in a highly corrosive or high concentration of formaldehyde working environment, obviously robots are a more suitable choice than humans. Compared with the post-90s, the robot does not care about the work content, nor is it tired, and has higher labor efficiency. In terms of the accuracy and cleanliness of the operation, the work quality of the robot is also more stable, and the production loss is less manpower. "Not only do robots have significant advantages in terms of efficiency and safety, but also in terms of cost, the biggest obstacle that hindered enterprise applications in the past, industrial robots have gradually gained advantages. According to Li Gang, one robot can replace three workers in the 3C industry's loading and unloading stations. The cost of this kind of robot is in the early 100,000 yuan, and the service life is about 3-4 years. The maintenance fee required after taking the job is not high, and the annual salary and welfare expenditure of the three workers is more than 150,000 yuan. In other words, using the robot for 1 year will pay for itself.

Cost is no longer an obstacle, and there is huge space for emerging industries

After the cost difficulty was gradually overcome, the application prospects of industrial robots in various industries have been greatly expanded. "Robots are widely used in many potential industries. Opportunities to show their talents. In recent years, we have seen the huge potential of industrial robots in the fields of 3C, bathroom product manufacturing, logistics, mining, oil and gas and electric vehicles, and we have also seen the success of transplanting traditional industry applications to emerging industries. Case." Li Gang is very optimistic about the future development of robot business.

"For example, handling and palletizing, one of the typical applications of robots. In 2007, the customers of ABB robots mainly came from the tobacco industry, because the product value of cigarettes is very high, and the damage caused by manual handling will bring great harm. Waste, so robots first entered this field. In the next few years, robots entered the pharmaceutical industry with relatively high product value; around 2010, they entered the food and beverage industry, and later applications included grain, dairy, salt, feed, etc. We currently see One of the emerging industries in handling and palletizing applications is brick and tile and coal mining. All this has changed in less than 7 years, which gives us reason to believe that the application potential of industrial robots is unlimited.”

Industry Case: Human-Machine Collaboration

ABB is deeply involved in the Chinese automotive industry, and has cooperated with many Chinese domestic and joint venture manufacturers to build a large number of automated production lines for body spot welding, handling, painting glue and other processes. The production line can realize the co-production of a variety of different models, which improves the production flexibility; at the same time, the vehicle off-line time is shortened to one minute or less, which improves the production efficiency; automatic welding and gluing greatly reduce the errors that may be caused by manual operations. , improve vehicle quality.

In 2013, ABB became the first robot supplier in China to provide water-based adhesive system solutions, and provided Volvo Car Group's newly built production base in Chengdu with spraying, gluing and cleaning. The overall solution for robotic spraying applications. Water-based glue is an environmentally friendly water-based liquid sound insulation and noise reduction material. The difficulty of the water-based glue gluing process is that the water-based glue has high abrasiveness and is sensitive to temperature and pressure. It requires wear-resistant pipeline materials, reasonable pipeline layout and glue temperature control. Volvo Cars uses ABB robots to spray the water-based adhesive on the interior of the car, such as the chassis. After it solidifies, it can effectively reduce the noise and vibration generated during the overall operation of the car, creating a quiet and comfortable driving environment for car owners. The content of volatile organic compounds in the car will minimize the pollution to the environment and damage to human health, and improve the air quality in the car.

In emerging industries such as 3C and sanitary ware, where there are still many applications of manpower, and robots are mainly used by small and medium-sized enterprises, ABB has also had successful cases with its partners.

For example, ABB provides a robotic stainless steel faucet grinding solution for Supor Sanitary Ware. In this case, the traditional stainless steel grinding work itself is very hard, and metal dust is also a great threat to human health. With the occupation of workers With the improvement of health and safety awareness, the labor problems faced by factories have become increasingly prominent. In the case of more exposed skin in summer, the turnover rate of workers has even reached nearly 100%. In this case, the factory chose to use robots for grinding, which not only solved the labor problem, but also improved product quality, and the cost of a single product was also reduced by 30%.

In September 2014, ABB launched YuMi, a robot that can truly realize human-machine collaboration for the first time in the world. YuMi is short for "you and me" in English, and it does realize the harmonious coexistence of workers and robots to accomplish the same task together.

According to ABB, YuMi was initially developed to meet the demand for flexible and flexible manufacturing in the consumer electronics industry, and will gradually be applied to more markets in the future. YuMi is a collaborative dual-arm assembly solution that is both visual and tactile. YuMi's arms are dexterous, wrapped in soft materials, and equipped with innovative force-sensing technology to keep human colleagues safe. Safety is embodied in the various functions of this robot, which allow it to work in an open environment.

From the precision parts of mechanical watches to the handling of mobile phone, tablet and desktop computer parts, YuMi can handle it with its precision, even threading a needle.

This is the change that industrial robots bring to Chinese manufacturing. Robot companies represented by ABB not only continue to help traditional industrial robot application industries such as automobiles improve efficiency, but also play an important role in more and more emerging application industries such as 3C. "Liberating" people from boring production lines is undoubtedly the only way for China's manufacturing transformation in the future, and robots are the best substitute for doing their part.