5 days ago
Coherix Launches Program To Tackle Sticky Manufacturing Issue
Coherix 3D adhesive dispensings system inspection station. The company has launched Coherix CARES to ... More customers for maintenance, training and other technical support.
A manufacturing technology company has launched a program to help auto factories avoid facing a sticky situation. Where many parts and components were once primarily welded together by robots, those same robots are now using high-performance adhesives to do the job and they don't always get it right.
In the case of cars and trucks, if the adhesives aren't applied correctly, occupants' safety could be at risk.
'The urethane on glass--that's all that's holding that glass in there is the glue. So that's a very critical application,' said Dwight Carlson, chairman and CEO of Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Coherix, in an interview.
He also pointed to the critical role adhesives and sealants play in the myriad electronic systems in today's vehicles.
Terry Taylor leads a dispensing-system engineering team at Coherix that will provide training and ... More service support for Coherix Cares customers.
That's why Coherix has launched Coherix Cares, a subscription-based program to help ensure robots are applying adhesives and sealants correctly along with providing expert support at factories already equipped with the company's 3-D laser-based inspection systems.
'The idea was to create a program to help our customers bring things up to a certain level and help them maintain those using our systems as a tool to provide process feedback and make sure that their process is delivering the best capability that it can,' explained Jared Rogers, Coherix applications engineering manager.
But don't lay all the blame on the robots if things go awry on the production line, warns Carlson. Coherix Cares is a backstop for the growing threat of human error.
Coherix 3D inline inspection tracks the dispensing path comparing the shape, the continuity, the ... More volume and location to manufacturer specs
'The technology going into these plants is increasing all the time, and at the same time, they're trying to reduce costs anywhere they can,' said Carlson. 'As a result, there's less skilled people in these plants. At the same time, high technology like ours is going in. So there a big need for somebody to fill that gap.'
It all begs the question of how hard is it to correctly apply glue? For a human with a brain and fine motor skills, it's not a big trick to adjust to different parts and conditions.
It's a lot different for a robot, says manufacturing expert and principal at Autotech Ventures, Ivy Nguyen.
Ivy Nguyen, a principal at venture capital company Autotech Ventures.
'Humans know how to adjust to that on the fly, whereas a machine may have to be trained on thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, millions of examples of what do you do,' said Nguyen. 'AI has made it possible to make those micro adjustments on the fly, I think, much more successfully than a machine designed in the 1980s might be able to do, but at the same time, if you need to make larger changes and how the glue is applied, you probably have to come in and rewrite some of the programs a bit, retrain the models a bit, in order to get it to work successfully.'
Nguyen also points out today's factories may include equipment and systems from many different vendors making maintenance a bigger challenge.
Coherix Cares subscriptions run for a year at a time on a sliding scale on a per sensor rate and how much support the customer desires, according to Rogers.
' So when I kind of came up with the ballpark numbers for this, it looks like the low end, about $3,000 per system. The high end, about $5,000 per system,' Rogers said.
After putting out feelers for Coherix Cares around six months ago, within the last month the company landed a major Japanese automaker in the United States to adopt the program last month for powertrain assembly lines.
Carlson declined to name the company citing confidentiality considerations.
He's confident the roster of subscribers will grow given the company has more than 5,000 3D laser-based inspection systems worldwide systems installed at 51 auto manufacturers and 75 tier one suppliers.
Indeed, the company says it expects to enroll more than 15% of its customer base to Coherix Cares subscriptions over the next several years.
