Realtime Robotics, which develops collision-free autonomous motion planning for industrial robots, has announced that it has been named an official supplier for the BMW Group.
This means the company’s robot motion planning and control software, RapidPlan, can now be used within the BMW Group to help improve the speed and efficiency of industrial robot programming, deployment and control.
The software was designed to visualise, prioritise and simulate robot path plans to speed up the implementation of industrial automation.
“Manual motion planning in multi-robot systems is prohibitively expensive for all but the largest lot sizes and longest-lived products,” said Peter Howard, CEO at Realtime Robotics.
“Making it easy for manufacturers to create collision-free path plans by simply ‘pointing and clicking’ can save organisations weeks to months of programming time.”
The company explained that its software can be used to help improve the process around the 3D computer tomography scanning of automobiles, which is done to quality check assorted joinings.
The cell was designed to use robots to x-ray vehicles and identify any issues, but it ended up being a time-consuming process to complete for even a single automobile. This is because the robots used during the process had to be programmed with the exact geographies of the vehicles they’d be working around and scanning.
These difficulties were compounded by the fact that each vehicle model was different, meaning robot programming reuse was limited.
Realtime Robotics’ technology was employed to try and improve the programming of robots in this operation and choreograph their movements to make them collision-free.
Once this was achieved, the team working on a vehicle could identify which scan points were easily reachable and which ones needed direct attention.
What’s more, with RapidPlan in place, customers reportedly improved the efficiency of their scanning operations, enabling technicians to concentrate their efforts on setting up and validating the remaining tough-to-reach areas, instead of wasting time reviewing and validating every part.
