Manufacturing
Standard cells, distributed production, one simple part first.
A written plan. No factory cell, conveyor, inserter or line exists, and nothing has been produced.
The model
Distributed automated production
Many small automated sites, not one enormous plant.
Standardized Factory Cells
Several standard sizes. One footprint wastes space or cripples the work.
Fixed routing first
Conveyors and inserters. Mobile robots only where routing is awkward.
Simple splitters before smart ones
Predictable first. Smart routing once a line shows where it is needed.
Service routing under the floor
Raised floor and trenches, so the floor stays clear.
Criticality based buffers
A cheap part that stops everything gets a deep buffer.
Buy the ordinary things
Steel, wire, fasteners, bearings, electronics. A human owns suppliers.
First proof of concept
Deliberately boring, so the automation is the hard part rather than the part.
- Target
- End to end automated production of one simple part
- Part
- A non safety critical automotive cable management clip
- Process
- Additive manufacturing
- Why this part
- Deliberately unglamorous. The hard parts are automation, quality control and traceability.
What end to end means
- Material in, part out, no manual step
- Camera and weight checks on every part
- Rejects quarantined, not discarded
- Full traceability: what, when, which cell, what settings
- Carl pauses a cell on a failure pattern, a person decides next
A rejected part is the only direct evidence of what went wrong, so it is kept.
Factory planning in a display volume
A far future concept that depends on hardware which does not exist.
Far future concept
A room scale holoprojector for planning a factory before it is built. Ghost cells and conveyors at a size people can walk around.
- 01
Plan
Lay out cells, routing and walkways
- 02
Simulate
Run throughput, compare alternatives
- 03
Approve
A person signs off a specific layout
- 04
Build
The layout becomes build instructions
Further out the ghost layout could track the real floor. That needs hardware which does not exist.