Robcad dash for Freelander

Robcad dash for Freelander

Keywords Assembly,Automotive industry, Robots, Rover, UK

The Rover Group's Body and Pressing Plant in Swindon, UK has installed its second Robcad seat, following a successful launch project ­ to design the manufacturing cell for the assembly of the upper dash structure of Land Rover's new Freelander sports utility car.

The plant supplies structural components to all of the Rover Group's main production lines in Cowley, Longbridge and Solihull where the Freelander is built. Production facilities at Swindon are backed up by an experienced engineering and tooling design capability covering automated assembly and robot production cells.

Rover chose the Freelander's upper dash assembly for the Robcad launch trials as it provided a single manageable production-based project on which to fully evaluate the use of the software tools throughout the complete design to commissioning cycle.

The cell incorporates five robot stations with three manual loading areas. Components are assembled on a rotary table at the first station for spot welding by robot. The structure is then manipulated by robots through fixed guns for the subsequent operations,during which the assembly weight builds up to over 22 kilogrammes.

Rover has produced a list of 20 key benefits resulting from using Robcad in the design of the process. All welding locations were correctly placed and perfectly perpendicular to the surface (Plate 2). The spot weld guns and tooling were proved at process and design stages to avoid collisions and select the fastest robot path for welding. It was proved that multiple welding guns could be operated together provided the correct weld sequence was established at the process planning stage.

A significant value-added contribution relative to all future robot installations has been calculated and Rover's process design manager, Bob May has already initiated a number of follow-up projects on the Freelander programme.

"Robcad enables us to assess and advise of manufacturing requirements to body engineering before we start work on designing the manufacturing process", says Bob May.

 Plate 2 Using Robcad man to simulate manual welding operations

"We can view the component CAD solid model and check access to all the weld positions and if necessary,make recommendations for a change in the component design. Robcad will also validate the weld positions and recommend alterations to achieve optimum performance from the robot".

Many additional benefits are still being realised by the Swindon plant as experience with Robcad grows. Since it was installed in June 1996, the first seat has been used mainly for initial conceptual work and feasibility of new tooling designs. The second Robcad seat has provided additional capacity for design for manufacturing studies and off-line programming for robots. This helps by bringing forward a lot of work which previously could not start until the robot installation was close to final commissioning.