ABB, a long-standing Volvo Cars supplier, will offer more than 1,300 robots and functional packages to assist the Swedish automaker in building the next generation of electric vehicles and meeting its ambitious sustainability ambitions.
Marc Segura, ABB Robotics President, said, “The automotive industry’s historic transformation, driven by increasing consumer demand for electric vehicles and a desire to operate more sustainably, is creating new opportunities as well as challenges for global manufacturers. This latest commitment from our partner Volvo Cars demonstrates our shared focus of delivering more sustainable manufacturing. Through our new, energy efficient large robot family and OmniCore controllers we will help to deliver energy savings of up to 20 percent at sites around the world.”
This agreement contains functional packages that cover a wide range of manufacturing processes, including spot welding, riveting, and dispensing, as well as flow drilling and ultrasonic weld inspection. Each package consists of a ready-to-use, customer-proven combination of hardware, software, and services that will be implemented at Volvo Cars’ facilities in Torslanda, Sweden, and Daqing, China. ABB’s latest OmniCore robot controllers, in addition to the hardware and functional packages, will help to offer energy savings of up to 20% at sites due to their extremely efficient power electronics and usage of regenerative braking within the robot.
ABB will maintain uninterrupted production during the deployment by using its RobotStudio planning and programming software platform to visualize and optimize the deployment before the robots are installed. Volvo Cars and ABB will produce solutions that can be engineered once but deployed several times by creating and validating the required automation systems in a virtual space.
Volvo Cars and ABB have long collaborated on collaborative projects to increase the efficiency of automobile manufacture and the capabilities of industrial robots in this field. The two companies will collaborate on this latest project over the next three years, with the first deployments expected in early 2024.