Why Flexible Automation
– AEi's Flexible Automation Philosophy
A high percentage of our customers’ manufacturing
applications require flexible automation to accommodate
rapidly changing products with shorter market life cycles
for their customers.
Why is Flexible Automation Important?
Unlike tradition fixed or hard automation, flexible
automation can manufacture a variety of different products
instead of a single product. This wider range of capability
has potential advantages in many industries, especially
those where product life cycles are short or where product
families need to be produced with many permutations.
The many different advantages of automation, including
lower labor costs, faster cycle times, better process
repeatability, and higher yields are more easily justified
as the cost of implementation spreads over a wider volume
of manufactured goods. Flexible automation also supports
faster new product introduction and ramp up to production,
as long as the level of flexibility is high and effectively
implemented.
How to Best Achieve the Benefits of Flexible Automation
As the level of flexibility in automation equipment
increases, the complexity of this equipment also increases.
Traditionally, this lead to substantially higher procurement
and maintenance costs. It also meant that often the
equipment was less available to operate, due to maintenance
or production changeover time. The best approach to
minimizing these drawbacks is to incorporate three primary
building blocks to achieve cost-effective flexible automation
solutions:
- Modular interchangeable tooling and subsystems that
support multiple different manufacturing operations
on the same platform as required
- Machine vision and other highly capable and flexible
active sensing and instrumentation technologies
- Highly capable control software that is quickly
re-configurable to support different manufacturing
processes and sequences without requiring traditional
programming
Specific Tools to Facilitate Flexible Automation Implementation
 AEi often uses kinematic couplings to make swapping
out tooling and fixturing modules fast, accurate, and
repeatable. Using station bases with features such as
precision optical breadboards enables quick changes
of motion stages, material handling subsystems, and
processing subsystems for new products or processes.
Active air isolation minimizes the effect or impact
of external vibrations on precision automation systems.
This is essential when the positioning accuracies for
alignment are in fractions of a micron.
 AEi uses a wide variety of sensing technologies, both
contact and non-contact, in flexible automation implementation.
Our machine vision and active alignment algorithms use
direct feedback on product and process performance from
the activated product itself to improve manufacturing
yield and cycle time. Monitoring force feedback from
grippers is another AEi technique which gives the automation
system flexibility in handling, and compensating for,
variations in parts.
 Our FlexAuto integrated machine vision and motion control
software platform supports integrated machine control
sequencing that can be quickly and easily modified for
overall station control. We use this to monitor and
interpret the output of the wide variety of contact
and non-contact sensors and instruments used in the
feedback process. This control software has been designed
specifically for flexible automation, using process
sequencing recipes that can be easily created and modified
without traditional programming.
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