Youibot Seizes The Logistics Highland Of 3C Production Line

In recent years, the emergence of industrial autonomous mobile robots (AMR) conforms to the general trend of flexible manufacturing, especially in the 3C industry, which is a new highland for AMR applications.

According to the survey results of the Advanced Robotics Industry Research Institute (GGII), AMR, as a new generation of mobile robots, is quite different from the previous two generations of AGV products from the perspective of application requirements. Industrial AMR is more used in emerging incremental markets, such as Emerging 3C electronics, new energy, semiconductors and other industries. The automotive industry is more dominated by the field of auto parts.

However, under many restrictions, there are many difficulties in the application of AMR in the 3C industry. However, with the improvement of technical level and know-how ability, the problems will be solved one by one. Youibot is one of the AMR companies that has made efforts to conquer the 3C field and has achieved certain results.

Difficulties are opportunities

The 3C industry is currently facing many challenges. For example, companies need to provide high-quality and intelligent products in an uncertain market environment; the trend of customer demand personalization is becoming more and more prominent; product iteration is accelerated, and the life cycle is shortening; Getting products to market faster is the key to staying competitive.

The direct impact of many challenges is that the 3C industry has put forward higher requirements for the flexibility and adaptability of production lines, and this is where the opportunity for AMR lies. It is understood that there are currently three main types of AMR applications in the 3C industry, flexible storage and sorting in warehouses, flexible logistics for separate production lines, and flexible logistics solutions for factory and warehouse integration. But no matter what type it is, it can effectively help enterprises improve the flexibility of production lines and improve production efficiency.

However, with super-large production plants, compact production tasks, frequent transportation of various materials, and close coordination between people, equipment and systems, how can in-plant logistics be supported safely and efficiently to ensure high efficiency? AMR still faces many application difficulties in the 3C production workshop.

• Compared to the scenes faced by traditional rail-type AGVs, 3C scenes are more dynamic, crowded and narrow, especially in factories in China's 3C industry, the customer's requirements for the use of the area used for production are very high, and the logistics handling will occupy a certain channel. Therefore, it is hoped that the channel should be compressed as much as possible. The requirements for the flexibility of the AMR, as well as its stable operation ability in the narrow channel, highly crowded and dynamic environment, are very high.
• In most 3C production workshops, more than one AMR will be used. For example, in the transfer process from raw material warehouse to line warehouse, materials are frequently transferred, and multiple AMRs are required to be jointly responsible for material transfer in this process. How to achieve large-scale scheduling in an environment where multiple vehicles coexist is also a difficult problem.
• In the specific production workshop, some customers have introduced AMR products in the old production line before, and they do not want to completely cut out these products when the production line is renovated, so they will require multiple AMR products to coexist. The scheduling system and communication interface of each product are different, so in the environment where multiple vehicles exist at the same time, how to cooperate with AMR is also a big difficulty.

The combination of software and hardware to solve the 3C problem

In the view of Youibot, the answer to solving the 3C problem is to provide an integrated solution of software and hardware for intelligent upgrading for the entire logistics.

At the hardware level, Youibot has created application robots for load, line side bin material box batching, roller docking, mobile loading and unloading in packaging and testing workshops, intelligent forklift workshop distribution, and material flow in PCBA workshops, forming a product matrix of the material carrier covering the entire process section.

At the software level, based on the single-machine operation capability (YouiPilot), the multi-machine scheduling system (YouiFleet), and the delivery process-oriented deployment toolset (Toolkit), a reliable large-scale cluster deployment capability is created. Finally, combined with the smart logistics management system YOUI TMS, it provides highly flexible and efficient intelligent logistics solutions.

Specifically, in terms of AMR stand-alone operation capability (YouiPilot), Youibot's AMR enables it to detect the surrounding environment through data from cameras, built-in sensors, laser scanners, and intelligent algorithms to perform high-precision mapping and positioning, to achieve the consistency of multi-vehicle operation and ±2mm operation accuracy in the actual factory operating environment.

In addition, Youibot's AMR products have good consistency. Taking the transformation of the old factory building as an example, the robot needs to be connected and debugged with the equipment on the production line, but the old factory building is often full production when the transformation is carried out, because there is less debugging time left for the robot to stop production. With better product consistency, Youibot only needs to debug the first AMR product of each type, and the subsequent AMRs of the same model can be directly applied to the production line, which effectively shortens the implementation cycle and improves customer benefits.

In the dispatching system, Youibot's YouiFleet multi-machine dispatching system can complete many functions such as task scheduling, route planning, traffic control, docking with equipment, and docking with MES or ERP, which can meet the needs of customers for large-scale applications. The delivery process-oriented deployment toolset (Toolkit) allows Youibot's solution to realize multi-machine configuration, batch modification, real-time map recording and monitoring, etc., which greatly reduces the error rate of human operation and improves the deployment efficiency of robots.

On this basis, Youibot's solutions have strong overall planning capabilities, multi-machine collaboration capabilities, and large-scale deployment capabilities.

In addition, YOUUI TMS, the intelligent logistics management system of Youibot, can be connected with information systems such as MES and WMS of enterprises, and can trace materials, so that materials can form a complete closed loop from stockpiling warehouse to production line to finished product warehouse, so as to make the solution flexible and smart.

Under the integration of software and hardware, Youibot has solved the 3C problem. Take the PCB unmanned factory built by Youibot for a domestic PCB industry leader company S as an example. It is understood that the PCB flexible and rigid board manufacturing factory covers an area of 96,000 square meters, and 17 process sections are distributed in four floors. The process is compact. Each floor is 24,000 square meters, and the task frequency is as high as 1054 times/H. At the same time, the factory environment is complex, and the transfer process spans a variety of environments. The equipment needs to meet special environmental requirements,such as clean space, high temperature space, acid-base workshop, yellow light workshop, etc.

For this PCB soft-rigid combination board manufacturing plant, Youibot introduced 84 mobile robots and YOUUI TMS intelligent logistics management and control system to realize the connection of material flow and data flow in the whole site.

62 rotary jacking handling robots, 12 flat carrier handling robots and 10 carrier handling robots provided by Youibot circulate in the factory covering 17 process sections across four floors to realize the connection between material carriers and retractable triggers, line side warehouse shelves, vertical warehouses, elevators and automatic doors and other equipment, and complete the transformation of elevators, elevators, safety doors, automatic doors, and air shower doors to achieve cross-regional cross-border Intelligent material flow of equipment across factories.

In terms of final results, after the introduction of Youibot's AMR solution, the mobile robots in the factory completely replaced manual operations, saving 69 labors. The combined labor cost was 6.21 million yuan per year, and the ROI was less than 1.5 years. At the same time, the mobile robot can work 7*24 hours in a complex environment, avoiding the instability of manual operation and ensuring stable and continuous production. In addition, the YOUUI TMS system is connected with MES and WMS to realize the closed-loop data of the whole production cycle.

0→1，1→∞

The rapid landing of Youibot's products is inseparable from technology and products, but it is also inseparable from a feasible development strategy, and the same is true for Youibot.

The development strategy of Youibot in the 3C field is: benchmarking case + scenario replication, creating a benchmarking case in each segment of the 3C industry, and then copying it to more similar scenarios.

Specifically, in terms of vertical expansion, Youibot covers the upstream and downstream of the 3C industry chain with semiconductors as the core; in terms of horizontal expansion, when Youibot enters a new 3C industry segment, it focuses on leading customers to create benchmark cases and replicate scenarios on a large scale.

Xu Wei, head of the industrial logistics product line of UAI Youibot , said: "Youibot 's solutions have accumulated experience in the semiconductor industry with high difficulty, high technical barriers and high requirements for robots. The landing in PCB and other fields provides strong technical advantages, and the accumulated cases in the 3C field provide large-scale landing experience for semiconductor scenarios."

Based on the vertical and horizontal development strategies, Youibot’s solutions have been implemented rapidly. At present, Youibot 's AMR solutions have been applied to display panels, PCBs, electronic components, semiconductors and many other 3C related fields. The cooperative customers cover well-known enterprises at home and abroad.

As the world's largest consumer electronics market, China's 3C industry has expanded rapidly. In the future, Youibot will strengthen technology research, and use self-developed large-scale deployment, cluster scheduling and multi-machine collaboration capabilities to enable the 3C industry to realize intelligent manufacturing through AMR.