Robot-based technology for the automotive industry

Robotics Robot becomes a measuring tool

2024-07-30 Source: Mitsubishi Electric | Translated by AI 2 min Reading Time

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Modern cars are increasingly being equipped with radar sensors. These ever more complex sensors must be tested and calibrated in production to deliver reliable results in operation. Robots can help with this.

Up to ten sensors are already being installed in modern cars today. And the trend is rising.(Image: Johannes - stock.adobe.com) — Up to ten sensors are already being installed in modern cars today. And the trend is rising.
(Image: Johannes - stock.adobe.com)

Together with Mitsubishi Electric, Noffz Technologies has developed a robot-aided test system for complex sensors. According to a report, Noffz has identified a rapidly growing future market in radar test systems, as radar sensors are needed in millions of units and the volume continues to rise. The industrial robots from Mitsubishi Electric are the basis for the necessary flexibility, which includes the standardization of individual solutions.

Testing radar sensors, the precise positioning and movement in the test chamber is a particularly big challenge. The company entrusted this task to a six-axis industrial robot from Mitsubishi's Melfa-FR series. This offers the possibility to install cables inside the robot arm, minimizing disruptive reflections of the radar radiation. However, absolute accuracy and repeatability were particularly important, it continues.

Higher requirements

"The demands we place on the robot are significantly higher than for pure handling tasks or for welding or adhesive applications," says Markus Solbach, managing partner of the medium-sized company. "Because we use the robot as a measuring tool." A further challenge is the synchronization between robot movement and calibration program.

With a conventional robot control, there is a not exactly predictable delay between the start of the program and the actual start of movement, which is not acceptable for calibration. "That's why we decided to take over the robot control directly from a real-time system. We use Mitsubishi Electric's software in this case for handling tasks when changing the test specimen and for communication with a PLC," says Martin Nieskens, who, as team leader of the ADAS System Design Team at Noffz, played a major role in developing the test systems. "This is where an advantage of Mitsubishi Electric's robots comes into play: the open support of a real-time control with parallel processing of standard communication via a simple robot program," adds Michael Finke, product manager at Mitsubishi Electric.

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