IEN: What innovations are in store for users of equipment, systems, components, materials, and software?
Klenke: Car makers are becoming more of just an assembler, buying the car parts from other companies (i.e. from tires to windshields to radios to seats to hoods to chassis, etc.). So there are many suppliers that all have to get their pieces to the assembly line.
I visualize sequencing centers separate from the assembly plant that do subassemblies and deliver the subassemblies to the assembly plant "just in time." Somehow these pieces will be tracked from the supplier to the sequencing center to the assembly plant to the actual vehicle that it was built for. Some seats are made only 5 hours before they are installed into the car.
In some plants seats arrive in the assembly plant where they are automatically unloaded out of the trailer, automatically loaded onto an AGC, and automatically brought to the assembly line. Eventually, I would guess, all parts will be delivered by AGVs/AGCs to a robot with visual enhancement that will put the piece into the vehicle.
For now, the current method is to use carts that are tugged to the line, then pushed into place and installed by the person on the line.
Is not Boeing engineering a huge passenger plane where the wings are made in one place, the tail another, the nose another, etc., and then assembled in another? How soon before cars are built the same way?
(Photos show, on the job, a conveyor and a cart from Topper Industrial.)