In the 20,000-square-meter facility, robots run production lines so precisely that workers are barely visible. "Robots make robots", this scene has been in the Shanghai STEP robot factory located in Nanxiang town, Jiading district. The Shanghai-based company, which has been established for more than 20 years, has one of the highest densities of self-branded robots in Shanghai. Currently, all four of its factories are building digital factories.
Hailed as the "pearl at the top of the crown of manufacturing", robots are an important indicator to measure a country's level of technological innovation and high-end manufacturing. With such a set of data, 1/3 of the global robot production is in China, and 1/3 of the Chinese robot production is in Shanghai. The robot industry has become a new business card of "Made in Shanghai".
Smart factory is the main front of the digital transformation of Shanghai's manufacturing industry, involving intelligent equipment, intelligent robots and other integrated applications. Shanghai is promoting the construction of smart factories in different categories and accelerating the layout of the new track of digital economy.
Shanghai's first robot manufacturing robot smart factory
"At present, in the whole STEP group, the robot density has reached 1,080 units per million workers, far more than the national average level of 246 units per million workers, comparable to the highest international robot density countries." Shanghai STEP Chief Executive Office Director Zhang Zhenkui introduced.
The density of industrial robots represents the degree of automatic production in a country or region and is an important reference in the digital transformation of economy.
According to the 14th Five-Year Plan for the development of Shanghai's high-end equipment industry, by 2025, the scale of the high-end equipment industry will exceed 650 billion yuan, and the key segments will shift from international following and leading to leading. In the field of intelligent robots, Shanghai should make efforts in promoting the upgrading of industrial robots, expanding the scale of service (special) robots, and breaking through the core parts of robots. This year marks the end of the Special Action Plan for Building 100+ Smart Factories (2020-2022), which plans to build 100 smart factories and 10 benchmark smart factories within three years.
"Currently, the STEP robot Gigafactory has a workshop of 20,000 square meters, but only nine workers are responsible for watching the wires and carrying out some operations that require human intervention, while parts assembly, material transportation, precision welding, sample testing and other processes are completed by robots." Zhang Zhenkui introduced.
STEP Robot Gigafactory realizes "robots make robots"
Officially put into operation in December 2020, the factory is the first robot manufacturing robot in Shanghai, with an annual capacity of 10,000 industrial robots. It has been selected as one of the first 20 smart factories in Shanghai and the smart manufacturing pilot demonstration Factory of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. By using robots in batches, the number of workers is reduced by 80% and the one-time pass rate of product tests is increased by 15%. With the highly efficient and flexible automation technology, the design capacity of 10,000 units/year has been achieved, and the output efficiency per unit area has been increased by more than 30% compared with the previous manual operation.
The construction of smart factories will bring new impetus to the sustainable and high-quality growth of Shanghai's industry.
Intelligent manufacturing helps the manufacturing industry develop towards high quality
Fan Zeng, deputy general manager of STEP Robotics Division, introduced that the small load robot automatic production line in STEP robot Gigafactory is a modern robot production line of intelligent manufacturing, which realizes the production process of robot loading robot. This production line comprehensively considers the product structure of three series of robots, carries out process decomposition according to the manufacturing process, and customizes the assembly logistics line and tooling. On the premise of ensuring the product assembly quality, the production capacity balance of each robot on the production line is realized, so as to improve product quality and reduce manufacturing costs.
"The robots used in the production line are also STEP brands, and all intelligent manufacturing projects in the factory are developed and integrated by STEP itself." Fan Zeng introduced.
Workers may make operational mistakes on the production line. Will there be operational mistakes or technical deviations in manufacturing robots with robots?
Fan Zeng gave an answer: Since the project construction of STEP robot factory intelligent manufacturing is complicated and belongs to customized projects, there is no complete case for reference. In order to ensure the project quality and timely delivery, STEP built the first CAVE virtual commissioning laboratory in China during the implementation process.
Before the implementation and construction of the project, rapid review, ergonomics analysis, virtual interactive debugging of the production line, virtual maintenance and maintenance evaluation analysis and interactive product display were realized through the virtual prototype design under virtual digitalization. After several virtual digitalization drills and verification, the project was delivered, which also guaranteed the technical stability and quality improvement of the production line. Over the past three months, the qualified rate of STEP robot production line products has reached 99.4%.
There are many robot parts and the delivery time of some parts is long. In order to rationally arrange inventory, STEP robot factory adopts three-dimensional warehouse to store materials with smaller specifications, flat inventory to store bulky materials, ring sorting warehouse to realize automatic sorting of robots, and AGV to implement intelligent warehousing and logistics technology of material handling in the field. "Just like wearing a suit but also with shoes and ties, these robot manufacturing robot efficiency improvement corresponding to the support of the surrounding intelligent platform, reasonable use of space to ensure production capacity, to ensure timely delivery of products." "Van Zen said.
This year, in the face of the epidemic, the advantage of STEP's robot gigafactory's high-quality manufacturing capability has also become more prominent. In the market environment where foreign brands are out of stock and the availability of goods is competitive, STEP robots keep timely delivery and help the capacity expansion of downstream industries.
Today, STEP robot has promoted large-scale application in 3C, lithium, photovoltaic, white electricity, metal processing, auto parts and other industries, serving many manufacturing enterprises including "Industry 4.0 lighthouse factory" such as Foxconn and Haier. In 2021, STEP robot became the first domestic brand with a cumulative shipment of more than 20,000 units. We will vigorously promote the substitution of imports by domestic robots and the improvement of the industrial chain to help the manufacturing industry develop towards higher quality.
"Workshop brain" to achieve intelligent "intelligent" manufacturing
In the STEP workshop, there is a miniature simulation of an automated production line running smoothly in a busy auto parts workshop. Planner releases production tasks from ERP, and production supervisor designates workshop operation plan according to capacity constraints. But before that, the process designer issues the process management to the manufacturing department, and then the workshop operator controls the equipment to start the production task. The parts are assembled one by one and sent to the production line. After the production is completed, the feedback data is sent to the planner.
The process is efficient, accurate and, most importantly, less people-intensive than a traditional workshop. So, how can this series of automated production be achieved? Fan Zen said that the password is hidden in the most important intelligent manufacturing software - MES.
Fan Zengzeng introduced that, as the brain of the workshop, MES is located at the bottom of the industrial control system under the ERP. It provides the operators/managers with the execution and tracking of the plan and the current status of all resources (people, equipment, materials, customer requirements, etc.).
The eMES system independently developed by STEP can prevent the occurrence of various failures or other adverse conditions. It can also carry out a high degree of coordination between STEP's various systems and realize real-time data synchronization between different systems, thus reducing the working pressure and intensity of employees.
In addition, eMES system can not only realize the informatization and readable of workshop production, but also carry out quality detection and real-time feedback under AI visual detection, making the automatic operation of the whole workshop more intelligent and effectively reducing the disadvantages of "retarded" and "mechanized" automatic production.
"STEP also pays special attention to the energy consumption management of the equipment and the real-time monitoring of the equipment, reducing the loss of equipment operation." Fan Zen said that all of this operates under a visual data platform, which is a true realization of the "workshop brain" operation that is considered controllable.
Innovation-driven, seize the new track of digital economy
In 2021, STEP made a major technical breakthrough in the dynamic high-order algorithm, a key link of robot performance improvement. Based on the rapid changes of robot inertia and load, STEP could predict accurately and adaptively, and the key indicators of the robot such as running speed (beat), running stability, positioning accuracy and noise suppression were significantly improved. SCARA, arc welding and palletizing robots are thus realized and run with international first-line brands.
STEP robots form a complete product line
According to Dr. Jin Xinhai, President of STEP, excellent talents are the inexhaustible driving force for STEP's future continuous innovation and development. "STEP attaches great importance to talent development and has established a system of excellent talent cultivation with STEP University as the main body. After 27 years of development, STEP's R&D team has nearly 1,000 R&D personnel, accounting for 36% of the employees, undertaken 3 national science and technology support programs, presided over and participated in the compilation and revision of 32 national technical standards, presided over or participated in 8 industrial technical standards, and obtained 730 authorized patents, 242 invention patents and 266 software Copyrights."
Established in July 2021, STEP has become an incubator for STEP talents
In Dr. Jin Xinhai's opinion, from the development of STEP robot, we can see the development of China's robot industry in miniature. Over the past decade, the sales of Chinese robots have been surging, which has not only greatly improved the manufacturing level, but also provided human beings with the opportunity to share the convenience and happiness of the intelligent society.
Statistics show that today, the output of industrial robots in Shanghai accounts for about 1/9 of the global scale. International robots have set up their headquarters in China or robot headquarters, and domestic robot leaders have expanded their investment layout. At the same time, a large number of head enterprises in subdivided fields grow rapidly and rise as a new generation of industrial force and technology source.
"In the future, as the pace of transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry is getting faster and faster, the manufacturing enterprises are becoming more and more urgent to improve the efficiency and safety of the supply chain. A group of outstanding domestic intelligent manufacturing enterprises will get the opportunity, which is an opportunity for STEP to firmly grasp." Dr. Jin Xinhai said that next, STEP will cooperate with 12 key enterprises in the upstream and downstream of the robot industry chain in three provinces and one city of the Yangtze River Delta to jointly build "made in the Yangtze River Delta" robots, promote the application of domestic robot parts in the mainstream robot factory in the region, and promote the expansion of the application of domestic robots in the digital intelligent transformation. We will improve the resilience and safety of industrial and supply chains.