Assembly and testing of assemblies and systems are very labor-intensive and therefore have a major impact on costs and throughput times. Fully automated, PLC-controlled workflows, such as those familiar from the automotive or food industries, cannot be implemented in many cases due to the small quantities and product diversity.

The technology company TQ uses examples to show how automation and smart manufacturing in the areas of production, assembly and testing can still be implemented in a targeted and efficient manner with the expertise of its own specialists and the right equipment. The aim here is to automate time-consuming processes and repetitive tasks and make them more efficient despite the extremely large product mix and wide range of batch sizes.

Data acquisition, quality assurance and traceability

To keep investment costs as low as possible, it is important to combine different functions in one device. For example, the display of production documents, the recording of production data and functions for quality inspection and logging can be combined in one PC unit. TQ uses its own embedded PCs for this purpose, which are highly fail-safe thanks to their robust design in fanless 24/7 operation, thus minimizing downtimes. Due to the long-term availability of the models, uniform hardware is always available, which minimizes the effort involved in managing the devices and creates reproducible solutions.

Hand-held scanners are often used to record serial numbers and product data, which offer particular handling flexibility. Alternatively, permanently installed barcode scanners can be used. If these reach their limits because they are used for very different assemblies and systems with different product labels and tags, flexible industrial cameras can be used. In this case, the camera system can also take on additional tasks such as optical inspection and object recognition for pick-and-place functions in robotics applications. All these configurations have one thing in common: they require an intelligent hub where the data converges and is processed further. Embedded PCs are ideally suited for this purpose.

Link in robotics applications

However, an embedded PC as a node can cover much more. Versions such as the TQ MBox-ADV, which is equipped with four independent Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, several USB ports, RS-232 and a high-resolution monitor interface, are also suitable for coordinating different functional units of a partially or fully automated cobot application, for example, while keeping an eye on and forwarding all data for quality assurance, material scheduling, service, process optimization and additional IoT functions such as predictive maintenance. This principle of workload consolidation, i.e. consolidating several individual tasks in one device, saves costs and also offers the option of flexibly expanding and adapting the range of functions.