Every Automotive supplier knows the pain of receiving a customer complaint and avoiding this is a crucial part of the design phase of any new process.

What makes these complaints even worse is when the error is a seemingly insignificant but easily avoidable oversight or error. In this regard, much has been written and reported on the topic of mistake proofing. The Toyota model of Poka Yoke, or mistake proofing, calls for simple and inexpensive methods to prevent, detect and report on errors. In some cases, however, mistake proofing requires a little more technology.

Bran Systems knows this all too well and when their client reached out, they knew how to solve the problem. The product was a complex dash assembly. The problem was the potential for missing and/or mis-aligned components. In this particular case, no less than 52 fitment clips, with the system being able to be adapted to later check for gap and flushness measurements in 10 reference points.

The system is designed to handle left hand and right hand drive dashboards. In addition, the normal requirements of traceability and 90s cycle and setup time and a 0.1% failure rate.

Jacob Abraham and his team analysed the problem and devised a 4-camera station that would detect the 52 clips using 3 2-dimensional cameras and the 4th, a 3-Dimensional camera, to later perform the gap and flushness measurements within three sweeping left to right and back motions to limit the cycle time. The dash would be rotated to the required angle and a sweeping linear motion would detect clips in the pathwith a fixed 2d Camera for left side and right side clips and 2d camera on a horizontal rail with left to right sweep for centre clips. The 3d camera is also mounted on the same horizontal rail for the gap and flush measurement.

Cameras from hardware vendor SICK were employed, while the PLC was Siemens 1500 with Sinamic V90 drives and Simotic motors. This ensured very precise and reliable motion control.

The results were made visible on an Operator Interface next to the station and only when all requirements were fulfilled, was the part released. All data was automatically fed to a QMuzik Server to validate and record the result while the part was identified via a barcode scanner to ensure data integrity. In addition, the machine is easily configurable for different dashboards.

The project was delivered and implemented for the client within the required parameters of time, budget and performance.

Jacob and his team at Bran Systems are experts at designing complex automated systems. Do consider giving them a call for your next project.