BOSCH-1 Support workers and to reduce the error rate

Summary

Challenge

Robert Bosch España Fábrica Madrid S.A. is the mass-scale manufacturer for automotive sensors, which process is fully automated and is running 24/7 non-stop. However, the plant is also manufacturing Electronic Control Units, where small series of spare parts are supplied to car makers and aftermarket. Since the batches are small and it only requires a few hours in one month, even in some cases, in one year, hence it is neither possible nor economically viable to automate the production line for those automotive spare parts. Although they are small in quantity, they are complex in reference designs that usually BOSCH need to produce more than 1500 different reference designs. Therefore, BOSCH have workstations target for such small-scale production in the shopfloor supervised by experienced workers. It’s not hard to understand such production is prone to errors.

Use case

BOSCH expects to support collaboration and monitor the process, speed up task allocation, exception handling, reduce labour effort (lifting and transferring products) and quality checking operations, thus changing this area into a truly collaborative workspace.

This will be achieved by redesigning and optimising production process, to take full advantage of several new technologies – end-to-end production monitoring and execution including:

collaborative robots capable of handling and reliably manipulating Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) and boxes containing electronic components;
AGVs capable of transferring components and processed goods between the working cells without interrupting the workers’ tasks;
Augmented Reality to support non-expert workers in proper placement of the electronic components over the PCB;
Additional technologies like RFID or computer vision to facilitate tracking and quality assurance integration of this production process with the existing management software, including SAP used in the plant.

Currently the worker has to read carefully the instructions and understand the whole assembly sequence and actions required. Then they have to perform the assembly sequence keeping in line with the instructions. After the assembly is completed, the worker has to manually check if the assembled PCB corresponds to the result on the instructions.

Additionally, the transport of finished PCBs (depending on the final product to be manufactured) has to be done between floors. This introduces a big amount of non-added value worker time for performing manually these transfers. Additionally, in crisis situation, like the COVID pandemic, the personnel is reduced, and it needs to even more focus on added value activities instead of transporting items.

The objective of the SHOP4CF pilot is to release the worker from the cognitive load, and ensure the correctness and quality of the assembled PCB, as well as take over the transporting of assembled PCBs.

SHOP4CF scope: