As Ford Authority reported nearly five years ago, The Blue Oval has been using robot “dogs” built by Boston Dynamics in an effort to save time, reduce costs, and increase efficiency in the retooling process at some of its plants. Those robotic models scan plant floors and assist engineers in updating the original Computer Aided Design (CAD) at those facilities, helping them prepare a digital model for the retooling process – among other modern technologies. Now, it seems as if those same Boston Robotics dogs are being used for other tasks, according to Ford COO Kumar Galhotra.
“But in our manufacturing system, we are working with several partners on some very specific projects that can do AI and save us substantial amounts of cost,” Galhotra said during Ford’s Q1 earnings call with investors. “So we’re deploying AI in our PD system. For example, a lot of the time we take surrogate parts and then manually design a lot of those parts. With AI we’re we are automating the design process to take a bunch of weeks out of the PD system. I’ll share an example with you. We have a Boston Dynamics dog in our Spain Valencia plant, that’s where the experiment started.”
“It literally has sensors on it that can see, hear, feel the vibration, smell any leaks of oil, et cetera. It just literally walks around the plant all day long, and has changed how we do our preventive maintenance, because it can see and hear and look for error states well before a human being could. So we have processes like that going through quality, through manufacturing and through PD, using AI that are overall improving our efficiency in all those areas.”
At the moment, it’s unclear what Ford plans to build at the Valencia Assembly plant in Spain, which was originally slated to produce future EV models, but now, looks more likely to assemble hybrids. Interestingly, as Ford Authority reported in late 2020, Ford’s rival – Hyundai – previously purchased a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics.
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