Advantech: Make factories "intelligent"

Whenever a new popular mobile phone hits the market, there is often a "hard-to-get" spectacle. Many people say that it is "starvation marketing" by manufacturers, but in fact, the real reason is often that the design of new mobile phones is too complicated, which makes the assembly operation difficult, and the brand manufacturers have strict requirements on the quality of shipments, so the production line cannot be smoothly produced. The goods meet the huge demand that appears in the market instantaneously.

Interactive topic: What smart technologies are used in your factory?

In order to meet consumers' demands for higher quality and more diverse designs, manufacturers will face increasing difficulties in product design and manufacturing. At the same time, the trend of shortening product life cycles also makes manufacturers have to make their R&D systems and production methods more flexible and flexible.

Not only "automation", but also "intelligence"

Although most manufacturing enterprises currently use various automated machinery and equipment to improve the efficiency and precision of manufacturing, But on the whole, the automation level of Chinese factories is still limited. To meet the more demanding requirements of future customers, it is necessary to further realize "intelligence" on the basis of the previous generation of automation.

"Making machines smarter, that is, the so-called intelligent industrial robots, is the key to ensuring that the products produced by the production line can have consistent quality and can be delivered on time." Guo Lunyu, general manager of Advantech Baoyuan CNC, pointed out. "In the past, equipment suppliers would build the automation equipment they need because the factory wanted to produce a certain product, but when the customer's product function changes, such equipment often cannot be adjusted to make the original production line completely It is useless.”

As a leading manufacturer in the field of industrial control, Advantech has always been a firm advocate and promoter of industrial automation. According to Luo Huancheng, general manager of Advantech China, after the acquisition of Baoyuan CNC, a robot controller manufacturer, Advantech will enter the robot system integration and show its talents in emerging robot automation applications such as electronic assembly, food and medicine.

Advantech Baoyuan has industry-leading CNC technology, and can create intelligent products that can adjust functions, fine-tune precision, and install induction devices to improve efficiency according to new product requirements through software programming and other methods. It has changed the rigid and fixed processing mode that the past automation equipment can only achieve a single action and function.

For example, Advantech Baoyuan assisted a mobile phone foundry with tens of thousands of people in Shenzhen to build an intelligent and automated assembly line. This factory not only has to meet the high quality requirements of world-renowned mobile phone manufacturers, but also faces a tight delivery time or a sudden surge in shipments. Only through manual processing will not only have different quality, but also difficult to improve the production speed.

Advantech Baoyuan has established a six-station robot production line in the assembly part of its mobile phone case, "We use a single dedicated controller to allow six robots to share one brain, which not only improves the product Quality and efficiency, when the production line needs to be fine-tuned or used to assemble new models in the future, our solution can be easily completed by only modifying the software of the controller, no need to find new equipment to meet different requirements. Processing and assembly needs." Guo Lunyu introduced.

"The current market is very strange. In terms of electronic assembly, orders often skyrocket in a short period of time. As a result, even if many foundries have orders, no one can do the processing, resulting in a large gap in production capacity." Luo Huancheng pointed out, "Currently replacing people with machines, starting from the simplest AGV, for example, a large factory can save a lot of workstations, and the saved labor is calculated in hundreds, which can save hundreds of people. Robots can be used for simple assembly, loading and unloading, grinding, cutting, dispensing and other processes."

Intelligent technology realizes the "virtualization" of design and manufacturing

On the production side, intelligent robots and other equipment can make the factory smooth the impact of the order cycle, improve production efficiency, and reduce the replacement of new products. influence of the line. On the R&D and design side, more intelligent solutions are also required to be more closely connected with manufacturing.

Advantech proposes to design and manufacture PC-based machines that provide excellent graphics processing capabilities, which can take advantage of precise control, complex computing, and massive storage. For example, taking pipe bending as an example, the early pipe bending machines used PLC to control the machine and equipment, which could only provide basic processing functions. Therefore, it was still necessary to rely on the auxiliary judgment of the operator to record the correct data after many trial production tests. The process is then handed over to the production line for manufacturing, and the operator must pay attention and correct it at any time during the manufacturing process to prevent the deviation of the key bending angle of the metal.

The precision of PC-based motion control can be much higher than that of PLC. At the same time, Advantech's CNC automatic numerical control pipe bending machine control system also provides a three-dimensional preview function, so that the staff does not need to Instead, after entering the processing parameters, the most appropriate and smoothest pipe bending process can be found through computer simulation. In this way, it is not necessary to suspend the machine equipment to try out the pipe fittings, and it can also reduce the waste of the trial production and achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

Let the factory have "sense" like people

Make manufacturing "intelligent", not only higher equipment automation, but more importantly, making equipment, production lines, and even the entire Factories are "smart". Intuitively, it is like a human being able to actively perceive and judge the external environment. Therefore, many analysts point out that in the future era of smart factories, one of the most important infrastructures is the "sensors" that collect various data. These sensors are like human eyes, ears, and nose, and are windows to perceive the world.

"For example, data such as vibration, motion trajectory, temperature, voltage and current must be measured to monitor the operating status of equipment and factories." Luo Huancheng pointed out, "It's like a new car has always been fine. Suddenly one day the tire vibrates irregularly, it must be a problem with the shock absorber. So now through more sensing equipment, we can capture the abnormality in production, eliminate the defects, improve the overall quality, and finally reduce the QC link. The obvious learning of the smart factory.”

Traditional QC relies on manual labor to set up cards at layers in the production process, which is often time-consuming and labor-intensive, and due to the limitations of human characteristics, manual inspection is not completely reliable. For example, it has become a trend for electronic components to be nanosized. Imagine that an I-chip with a size of about two centimeters needs to put many solder balls or hundreds of pins. If such a delicate work is manually tested, it is absolutely inefficient and error-prone. . And through machine vision, which can provide highly accurate identification, this problem can be effectively solved.

For example, in a large panel factory, Advantech's machine vision solution is installed on the production line, and the 2D barcode on the panel can be recognized by a smart camera equipped with embedded image processing software. , which not only eliminates the error-prone problem of manual interpretation, but also reduces the risk of production line shutdown. At the same time, the data obtained by machine vision can also be integrated with the MES system in the factory. In the past, the problem of untimely supply due to the wrong size of manual input and the lack of corresponding products was solved.

From R&D design to manufacturing, manufacturing factories have great room for intelligent transformation. Advantech's case undoubtedly proves this.