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Predictive Monitoring
of Welding Robots

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Industry

Automotive manufacturing

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Asset

Industrial welding robots

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Goal

Deploy PDX to monitor robot health and predict failures, reducing unplanned downtime and maintenance events

Impact Icon

Impact

Predicted a welding robot failure before it occurred, allowing preventative maintenance to be performed, which would save the business approximately $4.5 million per year or more when rolled out to an entire factory

Overview

A Tier 1 automotive supplier with over 300 robots was experiencing 15-20 robot failures a year. These failures were caused by unexpected motor brake issues and led to a decline in robot accuracy and an increase in inefficient maintenance practices. More than half of the failed motors were continually replaced during production, resulting in costly unplanned downtime and wasted resources.


Solution

Before implementing a solution, the customer conducted a blind study with solution providers, including Predictronics, for real-world validation. Our solution, powered by PDX, detected a faulty motor intentionally installed in one of the customer’s robots. Our success in the study gave this company the confidence to select and initiate a pilot project with Predictronics.

Our pilot project expanded our winning solution to 20 welding robots in the customer’s facility for approximately six months.

This specific solution is easily reconfigurable for deployment in nearly any facility that employs industrial robots. Unlike solutions provided by robot makers, our PDX-driven solution can monitor industrial robots of almost any make or model.

Value

During the pilot project, our solution predicted the one failure that happened among the 20 monitored robots. In the automotive industry, robot failures can cost up to $300,000 per robot. For facility-wide implementation, the potential cost savings could be 15 times that for this customer, making the PDX deployment a clear return on investment.