Agility is the key to success for electronics manufacturers and therefore also brings challenges with it. Quality standards are rising in the industry, as is the desire to customize products. Added to this is growing cost pressure in production. Sophisticated process automation helps to meet these requirements.

Electronics service provider Frank Elektronik therefore relies on a collaborative robotics solution from TQ for testing PCBs. The automation solution has stabilized the precise test process and doubled production capacity. In addition, the cobot used makes the work of the factory workers considerably easier, as the collaborative robot takes over the monotonous, manual testing work and thus creates capacity for the more demanding assembly work.

The electronics service provider from Traunstein in Bavaria is part of the Elektronik Group, a supra-regional association of medium-sized EMS service providers. The company specializes in lighting technology and the assembly of circuit boards and modules. TQ's collaborative robotics solution has been in use since the end of 2020 for the automated functional testing of two different flat assemblies. Before the cobots were deployed, the test process was carried out by the same employees who subsequently assembled the PCBs. At that time, between 430 and 450 devices could be produced per shift. Since the cobot has taken over the test handling and the employees only assemble, the production capacity has doubled.

Two variants, two electronics function tests, one cobot

Specifically, the use case looks like this: The two device variants to be tested are placed in an infeed conveyor and then - depending on the variant - transported to the cobot in two separate tracks. The cobot places them in a buffer, removes the printed circuit board from the device and places it in the tester. It then closes the lid of the test device and scans the serial number via a barcode, which is the signal to start the test. Once the test is complete, it opens the lid and the test program sends a 'pass' or 'fail' signal to the controller. This tells the cobot where to place the unit: The units rated as good into the green area of the outfeed conveyor, the failures into the red. In total, a test process takes around 100 seconds. As two test devices are used, i.e. one for each device type, one mechanical challenge was to ensure that the cobot can grip two different flat assemblies at the same time. The robot used by Franka Emika solves this requirement by means of a double gripper, which ensures that the two variants can be handled without any retooling.

In general, the cobot can learn various motion sequences to be automated using manual instructions and can be operated easily and intuitively via a touch display. To program various sequences, for example gripping an object, different apps are selected from a menu on the laptop using drag-and-drop, arranged and then executed by the robot. With the correct programming of the apps provided by TQ, the electronics service provider has been able to gradually reduce the cycle time of the test sequence by a further 30% since the start of the project. The movement speed is now optimally adjusted to the duration of the test process, so that it is the test process itself that marks the performance limit, not the cobot. At the moment, the company's process is at around 80% of the volume that the cobot could theoretically process.