Study on Forging and Forming, Intelligent Production Robot System for an Automotive Component

This paper describes a detailed concept of Hot Forging and forming intelligent production techniques as currently practiced in the forging and forming industry. Automobile industries has been relatively resistant to handling automation because of the severe challenges that are faced by having typically small batch sizes, extremely challenging operating conditions in terms of temperatures and pressures and lighting conditions. This paper however, discusses how aspects of these difficulties can be overcome and it is hoped that the specific solutions and methodology presented will find general applications in other aspects of manufacturing industry. The concept of the ‘‘Automated Forging of the Future’’ is also introduced in which advanced handling such as rapid tooling-change and flexibility, smart metrology, advanced sensing and intelligent gripping techniques are presented. The concurrent objective of optimizing materials performance by manipulating materials structure for example, hardness and strength by the automated forging processes is analyzed, this concept represents the distillation of work on automated forging based system.