Flexiv Brings Profound Value to Customers in The Automotive Industry by Diverse Applications

Welding is a common process in car manufacturing, which often causes varying degrees of defects to the surface of parts, such as welding spatter, weld spots, and weld seams, bringing a significant impact on subsequent assembly and painting processes. The customer in this case, a leading new energy vehicle(NEV) company, is using manual labor with electric tools to handle post-welding defects and facing challenges in product yield, efficiency, and cost control.

Adhesive primer is commonly employed in the pre-treating process of car window installation to maximize the bond between the glue and substrates. Primers are often made from volatile solvents, which are potentially harmful to human health. Despite this, most automotive priming processes are currently performed manually, bringing problems of unstable trajectories and inconsistent quality at the same time.

Flexiv's automotive adhesive primer application features high flexibility, great yield rate, and fast deployment, effectively solving the pain points of high labor turnover and recruitment costs and assisting the customer's automation transformation.

New types of automotive steering columns (including wiper control systems) applying Hall sensors need to calibrate the shift level system to ensure the gear lever's user experience consistency. By using external equipment to map the gear lever's mechanical position to the Hall sensor's induction signal, force calibration can be completed.

Based on the adaptive robot Rizon 4s and the development toolkit RDK, Flexiv has created a steering column handle calibration system. While the robot performs a high-precision trajectory, it records the robot's end position and force data in real time, synchronizes them through SPI, and stores all data as a file. This solution can ensure real-time control, detection, data management, and other tasks throughout the process.

The assembly automation of flexible printed circuits (FPC) is one of the key difficulties in the industry. FPC is often small, soft, and deformable, making its grasping, insertion, and assembly challenging for traditional position-based robotic solutions. Most FPC tasks are completed using expensive and error-prone manual labor. Based on adaptive robots, Flexiv has created an FPC assembly automation solution, achieving a breakthrough in this process automation.

The power battery cover of new energy vehicles is generally made of metal or composite materials, which are large in size, light in material, and deformable. Besides, due to a large number(60-80) and the common quality inconsistency of through holes, it's difficult for traditional assembly solutions to solve the millimeter-level position error between the cover holes and lower screw holes. Therefore, cover installation and fastening still rely on manual work, bringing problems such as high work intensity, high NG rate, and uncontrollable quality.

Utilizing two independently controlled Rizon 10 robots in simultaneous operation mode and Flexiv’s indentation detection algorithms, both arms work together to install the battery pack cover like humans. Once the cover is correctly aligned, the battery pack is transported to the automated screw fastening station, operated by two other Rizon 4 robots.

With the rapid adoption of electric cars, parking lots are increasingly looking to offer car charging solutions to their customers. Installing a dedicated car charger per parking space is often impossible or cost-prohibitive though. Flexiv developed a solution to this problem by mounting an adaptive robot to a mobile platform that can navigate the car park and automatically insert the charging connector in the car charging port.