Thread: Tesla Robotics

This is some great manufacturing and assembly robotics. In my past life, I built stamping Dies for the Auto industry as well as many others. I also designed and built smaller robotics pick & place tooling as well as packaging robotics. This is a whole other level.

Bryan - very impressive. Also, I had no idea you had such experience as well.

I often wonder if Tesla is going to be the Apple of the car world and we will all be looking back 20 years from now wishing we had bought the stock when it was "reasonable".


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Mike,

There are a few of them in the parking lot outside my office. Very nice looking cars for sure.
I was a Journeyman Toolmaker for over 25 years and the last 10 I did 3D Solid Modeling of custom machines, created the detail drawings, went out into the shop and made the parts, assembled the machines and got them running, then went to customer locations and did the installs. If you have a large At-A-Glance desk calendar, we build the machines that put and glue the plastic corners on the bottom to hold each months page down. Also we built the machines that stitched all the contacts into the original ZIF Sockets when Pentium Chips were first introduced. The list is endless of the cool machines we built.

Originally Posted by Shadowfax

Mike,

There are a few of them in the parking lot outside my office. Very nice looking cars for sure.
I was a Journeyman Toolmaker for over 25 years and the last 10 I did 3D Solid Modeling of custom machines, created the detail drawings, went out into the shop and made the parts, assembled the machines and got them running, then went to customer locations and did the installs. If you have a large At-A-Glance desk calendar, we build the machines that put and glue the plastic corners on the bottom to hold each months page down. Also we built the machines that stitched all the contacts into the original ZIF Sockets when Pentium Chips were first introduced. The list is endless of the cool machines we built.

Very cool Brian - especially those ZIF Sockets. I remember those early Pentium chips, floating decimal points and all.

Nothing against Tesla (or maybe that it is the Digital of cars as a.wayne is describing) but this type of robotics is used all over the automotive industry since many years. The first robots in the movies are the famous KUKA robots from Augsburg, Germany. ]

In all types of industries robotics play an important role. Look at this video where ABB (Switzerland) spider robots (called Flexpicker) are selecting pancakes. Due to the variable forms more impressive than the repetitive programmed tasks in automotive IMO.
https://youtu.be/v9oeOYMRvuQ

I never intended for anyone to think it was new and never seen before, just found them informative and interesting. As stated above, I was designing and building Pick & Place, Packaging, and Assembly Robotics/Machines 20 years ago.

The ZIF socket stitching machines would Pick and place 2 empty sockets fed in the correct orientation out of a vibrating bowl feeder into a nest that was placed under the Insertion location. They were stitched 2 sockets at a time at 350 strokes per minute, which means that the contacts that were pre-shaped and plated, but still on the coil, were fed into the machine, cut from the coil and pushed into the open slot faster than the eye can see almost. At the same time the table was moving for each contact insertion, the two previous sockets were Vision Inspected in a second moving nest plate and accepted or rejected due to each insert matching a pre determined picture. When inspected, they were placed on a conveyor while 2 more were loaded for stitching and the previous 2 loaded for vision check. Rejects were kicked off the conveyor while accepted parts continued on for laser etching and serial numbering on the side of the socket. If I can find my old videos, I will try and post them.

I like this use of robotics: a Kuka robot preparing a German beer in the correct way!! https://youtu.be/Ax5jqGuId54