What do metal water tanks, pickup trucks and RV chassis have in common? They’re all assembled in state-of-the-art facilities that were finalists for the 2011 Assembly Plant of the Year award.
The Assembly Top 50 devoted $110.6 billion to capital expenditures in 2010. That’s 9 percent more than they spent in 2009, but it’s 21 percent less than they spent in 2008. Only 15 of the Top 50 spent more on property, plants and equipment in 2010 than they spent in 2008.
In 2010, the Top 50 employed 6.86 billion people worldwide. That’s 4 percent more than they employed in 2009, but it’s slightly under the total for 2008.
Vision systems used to guide robots pose different challenges for manufacturers than vision systems used for part inspection. The biggest challenge is guiding robots in 2-1/2D applications, where guidance is used so the camera maintains a proper perspective of a part that is level but included in a stack.
All day long, wire harnesses are sealed against
porosity at nine Magna-Tech Manufacturing facilities located throughout North America. These wire harnesses are of different
lengths, contain wire of different thicknesses, and are made by Tier 1
suppliers such as Delphi, ATPI, Siemens, Group
Dekko and Federal Mogul.
When preparing parts for assembly, automakers can
always use an extra hand or two. One automaker has found those hands at the end
of a dual-arm robot. For the past four years, the automaker has used the dual-arm robot to shorten
the cycle time to treat the front and back surfaces of a suspension component.
Bombardier Aerospace has borrowed several ideas from the auto industry that it hopes will help streamline production of the new CSeries regional jetliner.
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