Martorell, Spain, May 10, 2018 — Spanish car manufacturer SEAT releases new video footage of their robot-enhanced metal workshop in Martorell, near Barcelona. 2,000 of their robotic workers are synchronized to work together with 1,700 human employees to build one new car body every 68 seconds.
They took all this footage and produced a video to market it under a more artistic theme. They call it “A choreography with 2,000 robots”. You can find both the polished clip along with the raw video footage on our YouTube channel and embedded below.
SEAT is part of the Volkswagen Group and has recently also acquired the startup Respiro who is a leading car sharing service in Madrid. With this video, they want to showcase their high-tech Industry 4.0 setup, featuring robot workers from the German robotics firm KUKA, which have been acquired by Chinese Midea Group in 2016.
Robots are here to help, but not everybody loves them
The robotic workers and robot arms are facilitating activities such as welding, bolting, coating parts with adhesives or detecting deviations of up to 2 tenths of a millimetre. Some of these assets can stand up to a height of six metres and can handle up to 700 kg of weight.
Of course, it’s not possible to run such an operation without the help of humans. So they have also invested in a central operation centre to keep track on the health of the technology and monitor the processes. At this moment in time, Industry 4.0 is heavily about supporting human workers and making sure automation gear do not harm humans.
It’s nice to watch this video and just enjoy the sophisticated robots assembling cars together with humans but one minute of robots “dancing” to classical music might not ease the worries of the workers who wonder if they might get replaced by machines at some point.
YouTube: Industry 4.0 Manufacturing KUKA Robots Building SEAT Cars
Photo credit: All shown images has been provided as part of a press release by SEAT.
Source: Press release by SEAT
