Toyota engineering innovator takes 1998 Golden Robot Award
Toyota engineering innovator takes 1998 Golden Robot Award
Keywords Awards,Robots, Toyota
Dr Hisanori Nakamura of the Toyota Motor Corporation is the recipient of the 1998 Golden Robot Award(see Plate 1). The award, which has been endowed annually since 1984, is presented to a robotics researcher/developer who has exhibited distinguished work in the field of industrial robot technology. For Dr Nakamura, it is in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the development of advanced efficient robot spot welding systems.
Since graduating with a Master of Engineering degree from Osaka University in 1977, followed by a Doctorate in Precision Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1994, Dr Nakamura has spent all his professional life with Toyota Motor Corporation and is currently a general manager in the project planning department of the company's body assembly engineering division. During this time he has been involved in the development of body assembly technologies that are now widely applied within Toyota's production operations. Also, during his years as technical director of Body Production Engineering Associates (BPA), Dr Nakamura was a key person in the development and refinement of Toyota's body assembly system that has been adopted not just in Toyota but by other vehicle builders around the world. BPA Inc is a 100 per cent owned Toyota company that also markets its body production methodologies and devices outside the corporation.
Dr Nakamura's outstanding expertise is his ability to apply theoretical skills to real practical problems and to make true advances in the state-of-the-art of robot technology. This has been demonstrated in several areas, most notably in the field of off-line programming for spot welding robots.
In the off-line and robot systems design method developed by Dr Nakamura, geometric and non-geometric errors between the robot model and the actual robot on the line are automatically corrected without the need for costly time-consuming on-line measurement. The method has several other unique features not found in commercial systems and has been classed as one of the world's major breakthroughs in robot programming. Automatic generation of the weld schedules and selection of the optimum weld gun are other unique features of the system.
Plate 1 Dr Hisanori Nakamura of Toyota Motor Corporation
Dr Nakamura has also contributed to the development of Geisha (gun employing integrated servo-motor with high control abilities) system. It integrates the welding process and robot motion control systems by means of an electrical servo motor that functions as a pressure actuator. The system has been implemented into Toyota's robot spot welding lines since 1996 and has given benefits such as a 30 per cent energy saving, a 30 per cent productivity gain, a 20 per cent quality improvement and 20 per cent less noise.
(Source: IFR)
