Find & Seek
If you're looking to turn your manufacturing facility into a Smart Factory then real-time location system (RTLS) technology can help. Laura King reports.
The world of time and location-based data is growing at a staggering pace and its place in the automotive production line is pushing that evolution. The practise of increasing efficiency, cutting seconds, and increasing productivity has always been at the core of the automotive industry and Cambridge - based Ubisense has plenty of experience in assisting OEMs. The inspiration for their latest system came from the BMW assembly line in Regensburg and has now been rolled out in various production facilities across the globe, including BMW in China and the USA, MINI in the UK, Daimler in Germany, and Smart in France. Working closely with Atlas Copco – the Swedish industrial tooling and equipment business – Ubisense has produced smart tools which do the leg-work for you.
The first installation came at the BMW Regensburg plant, which produces the 1 Series, 3 Series and Z4 sports cars on the same line. The production planning system processes the customer orders and sends the customer-specific vehicle request onto the line. To utilise tools and set torques many plants use a passive RFID system or a barcode and scanner, which can be unreliable and labour-intensive. Ubisense CEO Richard Green highlights the problems the OEM was finding saying, “the operator has to pick up a scanner, scan the barcode that’s attached to a car, put the barcode scanner down, then work on the car that he’s just scanned – but occasionally the operator might get distracted, take a mobile phone call, and then go to work on the next car on the line. Of course he’s scanned the wrong car for the settings for the tool.”“They were getting a lot of misreads of barcode scanning and so they wanted to eliminate that activity. So, as we tag the car and the tool, we eliminate that activity for the operator. That saves time but, more importantly, it really error-proofs the whole system. The operator simply has to walk up to the car with the tool and the tool is then programmed for the car on which he’s operating.”
“It’s very common – particularly with the new generation of wireless tools that most manufacturers are introducing – that the operators want to work forward; they can fool the system by working up the line and creating themselves a time buffer. That’s a pretty dangerous activity if you’re not changing the settings on the tool for the car that you’re going to go and work on but, if you have Ubisense installed, then it’s impossible for the operators to have the wrong tool with the wrong setting on the wrong car.”Ubisense uses advanced ultra wideband (UWB) radio to locate and track small tags. As Ubisense removes the act of scanning a barcode, and the risk of faulty scanning, it can save as much as six seconds for each tool. On a line with over 140 tools this can mean gaining 14 minutes for every vehicle. This level of accuracy in geospatial awareness – the sensors can track a tool to within twelve inches in three dimensions many times a second – and reliability of data is almost totally unique to Ubisense and goes some way to explaining their global popularity, even having small installations in Honda and Toyota plants. Their work with Atlas Copco introduces them to the plant, and they then work hard to build relationships with OEMs, to provide upgrades to software and operating systems when needed.
Adding the tracking system and database to a factory is outwardly easy according to Green. He points out that on a final assembly line “work and cable trays would probably be running along the lines anyway for the forms of equipment”. This means Ubisense can simply “run our cabling into existing infrastructure and put up our network of readers along the line”. On something like the MINI production line, which is roughly two kilometres long, there will need to be between 350 and 400 sensor readers depending on the level of precision and performance reliability needed for a particular area. The actual installation time can be achieved in a manner of days; weeks if the area is bigger or the process more complicated.
“We have some fairly sophisticated tools for simulating a plant, quite early on in the process. Given the plant’s dimensional data we can model against that and simulate what the systems will look like and how they will interact. We can use that intimate early design workshop with the customers to make sure that they understand the kind of thing we can do, the inputs we need and the outputs we can give. I think we’ve got some fairly comprehensive tools but it’s still a fairly involved process, with the manufacturing engineers and often the systems people.
“Fairly early in the engagement, we would be working with the IT groups and they’re always satisfied with safety measures. There’s always an internal checklist for IT on network, security, wireless standards, interference and all those topics. They’re incredibly careful about those things and very early on in the process we’ll go through that discussion and I don’t think we’ve ever had a problem.”
Currently Ubisense offers an Assembly Control System, ‘Asset Manager’, among others, and ‘Ubisense VIP’ – a bonus package offering web-based user configuration, support for multiple-site operation and management of multiple components and multiple tags per component – as part of their sentient computing Smart Factory System. The company has developed this suite of applications by working closely with their strategic customers, who continue to stretch Ubisense into other areas of their business, as they see having one common location and identification system as being absolutely critical. Green mentions that this will be expanded in the future saying, “we have a whole road-map of things coming along, really driven by our strategic customers. That’s everything from tool locations, tracking at the beginning and into assembly control – quite a lot of activity in off-tracks and then into the yard – so we can genuinely put together an end-to-end system for the customer with a minimal number of systems to track and identify products and assets and make them visible and control them throughout the whole manufacturing process.”The current systems require a lot of investment, but the return is a direct productivity benefit in reducing the amount of time it would otherwise take to identify the car and the tool. The tangible ROI can be labelled at about 12 months and with multiple applications this can be shortened. There is very well-defined, detailed ROI that Ubisense can plug into the parameters – the tools and the station’s stack time, output of the cars and so on – to illustrate the benefits of a compound ROI.
“We’ve got something that is genuinely helping companies to be more productive and I think that’s a key driver in today’s market. Anything that can help improve the productivity of a manufacturing plant gets an airing and to have secured some of Europe’s leading manufacturers – and a global agreement with BMW to roll it out across all their plants – is a testimony to the return on investment that they see.
“Any benefits of this sort of system are additive or cumulative. At a high level, the general benefit is giving operational management – visibility and control. That can be simply knowing where assets are, knowing where products are, knowing where major component assemblies are, as they’re going along a line. Then, using the knowledge of that location to drive process automation, establishing the setting of a torque on a torque tool, or the setting on a rolling road for a particular VIN number. They’re both making the activity visible and then being able to control it. And then, of course, being able to collect that data means that afterwards you can analyse it and look at ways of improving the process. That’s a huge additional benefit you get as a consequence of providing that visibility and control.”
Green (pictured) has been with Ubisense since its inception in 2002 in an industrial lab in Cambridge headed by Chairman and President of the Institute of Engineers and Technology, Professor Andy Hopper CBE. During his twenty years of experience in the software industry, as a founder of Smallworld which was listed on Nasdaq in 1996 and was acquired by GE in 2000, he’s seen a lot of commercial opportunities. Ubisense continues to multiply, serving the aerospace business and expanding into industrial vehicles, from Cotton Harvester assembly at John Deere to hydraulic technology in industrial vehicles with Caterpillar and tier suppliers – notably providing a 98% reduction in manual search efforts in the repair area at the Jamestown, New York Cummins plant. The end product may vary greatly but the connections and software are easily adapted.“The basic infrastructure is the same and also the basic software. Of course, the quantities, volumes and throughputs are quite significantly different. Although we find extremes in automotive – at one end we’ve got MINI producing a thousand cars a day and at the other end we’ve got Aston Martin producing 20 – that’s quite a significant variation. Then you go into aerospace and Airbus is producing one plane a month. It is a different scale; essentially they’re doing the same thing but it’s a more complex assembly. One of the huge benefits of getting a system like this installed is that it really helps with flexibility within the manufacturing activity. Whether it’s aerospace – and that ranges from an Airbus to a fighter jet to a helicopter – or tractors, this technology can be applied to any relatively high-value product and its manufacturing process.”
The system has the ability to show when a person or object with an assigned tag enters an area, automatically locate it, show it in the Ubisense 3D environment and pass the data through to the Ubisense API and to other systems such as After Action Review (AAR) camera tracking. The only challenge Ubisense finds in inplementing systems, says Green, is integrating with the existing systems because “the OEMs have an awful lot of home-grown systems and middleware. When we began working with BMW we had to integrate with its particular middleware. Daimler has another set and Volkswagen another. Once connected the suite quickly becomes indispensable.
“In terms of giving people visibility over the supply chain, it can be an enormous help in helping to adjust according to new circumstances.”
In short, the ability to locate and track containers, tools and vehicles on a production line in three dimensions can provide a flawless line, cuts in assembly time and practical usable data to build on in the future. A system that creates a multi-dimensional data image of a factory and can spot errors is only the latest in sentient computing. Advances in mapping technology, physical tagging and geospatial software are still possible. No point waiting for them though, the current systems are already performing miracles.
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