Design of flexible spot welding cell for Body-In-White (BIW) assembly

Abstract

In this paper, a flexible spot welding cell - which is flexible both at fixture and work cell level is developed to handle multiple Body-In-White (BIW) part varieties. The work-cell is a human-robot cooperative cell where the operator loads/unloads the parts on one side, whereas the robot concurrently performs welding operation on other side. The fixture is made modular and is reconfigured for change in part varieties. The flexibility of proposed work cell and fixture are investigated and validated by considering two different BIW spot weld assemblies. The performance of robot, cycle time estimation for the process, checking of fixtures, collision detection between weld gun and fixtures are evaluated in virtual environment. The flexible weld cell is proved to be compatible for both the BIW assemblies considered for study. The proposed concept shorten the design & fabrication time of fixture - squeezing the investment cost, assembly cost and floor space; besides reducing the cycle time and improving the robot utilization by 30% - 40% when compared to the conventional method.