A leading car manufacturer has been relying on the pinpoint accuracy and efficiency of servo-pneumatic welding guns from Festo for many years. This manufacturer has now been able to reduce downtimes by 25 percent thanks to a predictive maintenance system from Festo which is ready for artificial intelligence.
“The first challenge here was to transfer the welding gun’s data from production to the cloud. Topics like network traffic, processor loads and data security were uncharted territory for both parties at that time,” explains Dr Jan Bredau, Head of Application Software for System Solutions at Festo.
The hardware concept of the servo-pneumatic welding gun was developed by Festo in close cooperation with experts from the automotive industry. This enabled product developers to take many of the features required by the industry into consideration, including the reduction of the envelope because the servo-pneumatic system is more compact than comparable welding actuators. Users can now install and operate the electronic and pneumatic sections of the control system either as a single unit or separately, in line with their requirements and the application. This makes the system more flexible and leads to the various concepts for mounting on robots.
If linked to the factory maintenance system, “predictive” maintenance orders are triggered in their usual environment and, if desired, sent by SMS to the maintenance technician’s mobile phone.
Source: Festo
