Force controlled belt grinding takes tailpipe seam finishing under one minute

Stainless steel sport exhaust systems for passenger cars · Sanding and finishing · Vendor published

The job

ATJ Automotive GmbH in Johanngeorgenstadt, Germany finishes the weld seams on elliptical stainless steel tailpipe ends, a cosmetic surface that customers judge by eye. Operators were doing it by hand at four to five minutes per part, a dusty job whose result depended on how hard a given person leaned on the belt as it dulled. The company installed a cobot cell using FerRobotics active force compliance tooling, so the abrasive now tracks the elliptical profile at a commanded contact force rather than a commanded position. Cycle time is published as under one minute.

The shop

FerRobotics publishes 80 employees, roughly 3,500 square meters of production area, annual output of 20,000 to 25,000 pipes, and 400 to 500 parts finished per week. The cell is described as capable of 24/7 operation, but the actual shift pattern run at ATJ is not published.

The equipment

Cobot based grinding cell; the cobot make and model are not published. FerRobotics Active Contact Flange with a belt file attachment, plus the Active Belt Grinder, both using the company's active compliance force control. Abrasive belt brand, grit and sequence not published. Dust and spark extraction not published. System integrator not published.

The published numbers

Cycle time less than one minute instead of the previous four to five minutes, published-by-vendor. ROI under two years, published-by-vendor, and this is a marketing claim with no cell cost or labor rate published to check it against. 50 percent lower personnel costs, published-by-vendor. 70 percent abrasive material saving, published-by-vendor. 400 to 500 parts finished per week and 20,000 to 25,000 pipes per year, published-by-vendor. Headcount change not published. Scrap or rework reduction not published. Belt change interval not published. Cell cost not published.

Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.

What we would check before believing it applies to you

A narrow, repeating part family with a short seam and a cosmetic finish requirement is the ideal first robotic finishing job, and constant contact force is the entire reason it works; a position controlled tool would gouge the ellipse or skip it depending on part tolerance. The 70 percent abrasive saving deserves a direct question: ask whether the comparison is belts per part or belts per shift, and whether the manual baseline counted belts that operators discarded early, because those two framings can differ by a factor of two. Nothing is published about dust or spark extraction, and stainless belt grinding throws hot ferrous and chromium bearing fines that need dedicated spark arrested or wet collection; in cells of this type extraction routinely runs 10 to 20 percent of installed cost and is the item most often left out of a quoted payback. The other thing the numbers hide is the acceptance standard: a cosmetic stainless finish is judged by eye, so get a written, physical sample backed accept and reject standard agreed before you sign, because that standard drives the belt sequence and therefore the cycle time far more than the choice of robot does.

Sources