Collaborative Robots Help Optimize Assembly Line at Ford Romania

Ford Motor Company in Romania was looking for solutions to enhance its manual workforce and generate added value to the manufacturing process. In doing this, the company realized the need for new automation solutions that offered space savings, portability, easy collaboration with people, and a fast return on investment (ROI).

Ford Romania installed four 22-lb payload cobots from Universal Robots. The “UR10” collaborative robots were integrated alongside employees on the assembly line, taking over repetitive tasks.

One cobot performs the greasing of the camshaft followers, another fills the engine oil, and a third checks the engine with a UV light and a camera for any oil leakage. The fourth is used for tests and training. These cobots do not require a human operator’s intervention unless a change occurs in the usual processes.

Collaborative robots offer many opportunities due to the complexity of processes they can easily accomplish, and their ability to work side-by-side with humans. These are key factors that contributed to Ford's decision to make a long-term investment in collaborative robot technology.

Transcript

00:00:04 [Music] my name is Josephine Payne and I'm the plant manager of the engine plant here in Craiova we've really found a number of different applications so yeah that's one of the advantages of the collaborative robots of the unit and the universal robot is that it's it's quite as compact footprint but it's got a long reach and

00:00:30 a good payload so it suits the applications that we've selected and we we really like them for the the small footprint that they take up the ease of implementation and the fact that they can work alongside our people it doesn't take a lot of my time and getting it implemented the team seemed very happy with me with the speed of implementation and the ease of implementation so and I

00:01:04 think we've had a lot of support from Universal robots itself as a company in getting those applications working [Music] [Music] families are opposed to this to the shuara ship practical perspective on maintenance a normal food problem a dosimeter gavankar john calipari meteoroid steam exactly how is the photo

00:01:36 sure they represent positive people Estill area the consequences for the guna first four to shoulder and research the implementer rapid efficient yellow territory so familiar is at forty repair deku assistive the robot so we're at the start of our journey with collaborative robots and we you know we started and put one in and that's gone very successfully and now we're looking at

00:02:02 more and more and we're seeing the more we use them more we learn about them and the more applications that we we start to see from them so yes I certainly think that in the future we will be will be using more and more of them