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The Future of Automotive Technology

Watch this video to see what the future of automotive manufacturing will look like. Clemson researchers including Dr. Laine Mears discuss their work, which includes robotics, smart tools, and much more.

Topics:
Automotive Manufacturing & Prototyping

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 hey everyone I'm here with Dr Lane MIRS who's a chair of the automotive engineering department at Clemson University and I'm in the Vehicle Assembly Center Dr MIRS you tell me a little about the Vehicle Assembly Center and what you guys have going on here sure so we're here in the Vehicle Assembly Center it's a Vehicle Assembly Hall with a full-size vehicle and the

    00:00:18 point is that we can come in here we can try different Technologies for Vehicle Assembly uh and we can mess things up and we mess things up on purpose which you wouldn't want to do in a regular Factory the reason we chose vehicles assembly is that we have Technologies like robotics sensing uh and other types of assisted Technologies and um we have people so there's people in the assembly

    00:00:44 operation and there will always be people in the assembly operation at least while I'm in the in the business okay give us a quick overview of what we're looking at here we have a vehicle behind us it's a a Mini Cooper and how you guys using the Mini Cooper and we're also on this like little platform here I'll set back so people can see there's a little platform here so what exactly

    00:01:01 is the platform the vehicle and some of the robotics we're seeing around us here so it's a great question so this platform actually came out of an original equipment manufacturer shop where they build vehicles and so we use all of the same technology that's used in the original vehicle shop the Mini Cooper is a special uh um special Mini Cooper that was designed and built by

    00:01:21 BMW it's an electric Mini Cooper it's what actually one of the precursors of the I3 vehicle okay uh and so we're looking at assembly operations and assembly uh uh technologies that would be applied to Electric Vehicle Assembly because we see that coming up more and more in the market these days um and what are some of the like the robotics we're seeing

    00:01:40 here there's a lot of like sensors and some speakers and a bunch of other like uh like kind of like laboratory equipment in this room sure so what we like to do is we like to use the same types of technologies that you're going to find in the factory so uh the same types of data enabled tooling so here we can have assembly operation that are happening with data uh and tracking of

    00:02:04 of the tool and the person and we collect that data through uh through a internet system here and we can do large scale sort of analysis of the of the type of data we use the same type of automation that you might find in a Assembly Hall so robotics I'm sure a lot of people have heard about uh some of the disasters of trying to take all of the people out of the assembly operation

    00:02:28 we're going to replace them all with robots doesn't really work there are places for robots and there are places for people uh and there are places for robots and people working together on tasks there are some things that robots do well there are some things that people do well we explore some of those Technologies here okay in addition to Dr mirors I'm here with Dr Matthew crew

    00:02:48 who's a research Professor here at the Vehicle Assembly Center Dr crew tell me a little bit more about what you and the students are doing here so we're doing a lot of work here around Vehicle Assembly as you heard from Dr Mir but we're also doing that to give students experiences with Hands-On so you saw the battery lab you're also moving with one of our vehicles right now so we also have them

    00:03:05 work on a full-size vehicle as well as with many of the tools that they're going to use such as Tor torque fastening tools we put them in the environment where we have a lot of those same industrial Control Systems the plc's uh the atlas CCO fascinating tools uh we have computer vision systems as well as real-time locating systems so we're bringing them and giving them

    00:03:24 access to a lot of the technology that they're going to see in the factory of the future and we're trying to make that the factory of today here in our lab so we're on this platform uh and this was brought in adapted from actual manufacturing floor right so we brought this entire platform out of BMW so we can also have that exact same uh stance where somebody's working and now they

    00:03:42 have to move to this moving platform to work alongside the vehicle so the platform moves alongside if you go into a a vehicle manufacturing plant you'll see a very similar setup of how the workers are are actively working we do that because we want to be able to test things like new robotic systems and new tooling systems in the same environment that they're going to be t Ed in in the

    00:04:00 real world and used every day and allows our students to mimic the real world but we can mimic it safely we don't have Dam we don't have cost from production we can shut this down we can shut this lab down move it faster we can speed it up slow it down without impacting things uh that would be critical to production processes um what do we have here this Mini Cooper maybe we'll give us a little

    00:04:20 bit more detail on how this Mini Cooper uh moves to the assembly plant uh it looks like there's some the engines removed on this Mini Cooper so give me a quick overview of what we have here here and and is this let me see if I can lift this up yeah so so this is uh actually an early prototype of an electric vehicle so when electric vehicles were first being designed this was designed

    00:04:41 by BMW Engineers um we use this now as an example of assembly operations that could happen uh with electric vehicles um particularly the batteries so how do we put together batteries and then how do we take these battery modules and install them to the vehicle in a way that's safe for people both electrically safe and ergonomically safe and in a way that minimizes cost and and keeps the

    00:05:08 keeps the product moving through the line we can look right behind us here this is actually uh we're setting up a subassembly area for battery manufacturing so we can explore how do we take batteries and put them into bricks and put those bricks into blocks and put those blocks into modules and put those modules into packs then you have a battery pack that's the type of

    00:05:31 uh uh driving energy that's used in the electric vehicle so we look at the individual assembly operations here this could represent a line side assembly operation a subassembly operation it can also represent a separate supplier that transmits materials transmits data to the assembly hall and then we how do we bring those be those batteries in here and what types of Technologies might we

    00:05:55 use to go up and install the battery on the on the vehicle okay and tell me a little bit more more about uh how you guys simulate the manufacturing processes I see a bunch of speakers here A bunch of sensors here um am my right that you actually have recorded the sounds from the manufacturing floor and we can recreate that environment by playing The Sounds here through this

    00:06:15 like High Fidelity speaker system correct so big part of that is we wanted to mimic what it's like to actually be on the factory floor this is very quiet in here right now but if we go ahead and we turn on the speaker system we can hear what it actually sounds like so we went out and we recorded using Bor microphones what it sounds like to stand alongside of the assembly line and work

    00:06:33 on that line and so we give people that emotional connection not just through the physical tooling and and tools that they're using but we can also give them that connection by having them listen and hear all of the noise and distractions that they have in the real world even down to the vehicle physically moving so one thing that people don't realize is that we as we we

    00:06:52 like to use things around us to know how long we have left to do our work one of those is uh workers have created a progress bar because they know where their station ends and where the next one begins and so when that vehicle gets all the way to that point uh we know that we that they're going to be finished with that process and so that's where we also want

    00:07:11 to have that connection to the environment as well so everything from what it sounds in fields like as well as the lighting inside of it we want to mimic that as best as possible so Dr mirrors was actually showing us this instrument but we didn't talk about it in detail he kind of gave us a brief overview of how it works tell me a little bit more about what this is a

    00:07:28 torque wrench I'm famili with torque wrench I used to be a mechanic and but I see like a remote sensor here uh tell us a little bit more about how this smart torque wrench works and how you're using it in your research so this is a very fancy version of the torque wrenches that you might have used in the past or have at home uh these ones are from Atlas CCO but um they are able to

    00:07:45 sense not just how much torque is being put into a bolt during a fasting operation but also how many revolutions and rotations uh but also the orientation of the tool so if we push and pull that tool or rotate it in different ways we can see that in the in the back end of the system if you've ever had to work with a bolt and you accidentally put it into an at an angle

    00:08:04 um it might cross thread and so we want to uh eliminate the need for that or for that to to happen out on the factory floor and so we've added new types of Technologies in these ones are added in by Atlas Copco and then we're doing is we're also adding in things like tracking system so being able to understand which tool is working on which Fastener across the entire vehicle

    00:08:23 so now we have a very good field of view when we go back and do any root cause analysis if there's any problems or errors in the future we know exactly which tool was used on it when it was used who was operating it and also we know a lot about the environmental performance of what angles were they at how much force and energy went into this so we have a much better idea and much

    00:08:41 better data driven understanding of what happened so that we can find that root cause and come to a and come to a Improvement faster okay and as we wrap up here um I'm actually seeing one more thing that's kind of interesting I see this like bodysuit and it looks like it's lined with a bunch of sensors something you might even see on like a on a movie studio tell me a little bit

    00:08:59 more about what what this bodysuit is and how you guys are using this bodysuit so it's a very good it's very good that you notice that it looks like it's out of a movie studio in this case this is a roko motion capture suit so we're pulling in using Imus that are inside of the suit textile itself and we can pull that out here so we're using the Imus that are

    00:09:18 built into the suit itself so we're pulling out all the different motion information from the suit itself uh we're able to capture from each of these boxes very high fidelity information about how a person is moving and flexing and this information goes back and creates a joint kinematic model of the person so we can see what they look like in Virtual space and record their

    00:09:36 motions very accurately all the way down to their fingertips we have a pair of gloves that goes along with this as well as face and motion tracking as face tracking as well we want to also capture not just the Vehicle Systems the robotic systems the data systems but also the people and we want to bring that data in we also want to push data out information out to people these are a

    00:09:58 big part of our manufacturing future especially in the automotive industry and we want to include them in that as much as possible so I know that some of the people watching this video might be perspective students and I know currently we have a master's program here we have a PhD program here I'm one of the PhD students in automotive engineering program but we've also

    00:10:14 opened this up for undergrads recently right so is this one of the facilities or one of the labs where undergrads and graduate students might have the access to get some experience and Hands-On work that's a great question so yeah I I'll start by saying this is the nation's only Department of automotive engineering and we run the nation's only bachelors in the discipline of

    00:10:34 Automotive Engineering Masters and PhD in automotive engineering we are Hands-On so we spend some time in the classroom but that classroom time is always uh mirrored by time spent in the laboratory space and as you see here we're not in a little 300 ft benchtop lab we're here in a laboratory that represents what uh students are really going to see when they go out as

    00:11:01 Engineers managers researchers technicians any of those roles that they're going to play they're going to have experience in the technologies that they're going to see when they go out there and the technologies that they're going to see a few years down the road so those are some of the things that we explore okay great and if students want to get more information can they just go

    00:11:18 to the Clemson University automotive engine website and I'm sure there's a lot more information there a portal applications we've spent a lot of time putting a really nice automotive engineering department we ite together so you can go check that out uh it's got all of the information on our bachelor's Masters PHD programs it's got information on certificate programs uh

    00:11:38 for students that aren't seeking a degree but still want some of the experience uh and distance learning programs so we can have students from all over the world participate awesome all right well thanks so much appreciate it right great talk with you today you thank you okay bye