Past opportunity

Automated Screw Handling with Atlas Copco

Sorting automation
Sortation system
Screw feeding

Industry

Industrial equipment and automation

Revenue

2020

€9.6B

Employees

2020

40,000

Countries

2020

70+

About

Atlas Copco is a leading manufacturer of industrial assembly equipment for automotive assembly workstations. One of our key product areas includes equipment used for handling, inserting and tightening screws into vehicle components. Targeting efficiency and quality increase, as well as manual labor cost reduction, we are looking for solutions to automate screw sorting and feeding in automotive assembly workstations.

Opportunity overview

Currently, screw sorting and handling in automotive assembly workstations involves manual labor, which poses challenges to quality and efficiency improvements. In practice, a human operator is required to pick the right type of screw and hand it over to a tightening tool held by a robot. Basically, the goal is to get the screw to the front of the tightening tool without human intervention. The vast amount of different types of vehicle models, components, screws and tightening tools creates big challenge for automation.

Atlas Copco is looking for various solutions that can automatically i) detect, sort and separate screws from various other industrial equipment parts, and ii) hand, convey or otherwise move the selected screws to an automatic screw gun. The solution should be flexible in terms of screw and tightening tool types, and preferably also in terms of production layouts and processes.

Your opportunity with Atlas Copco

Atlas Copco Industrial Technique provides smart industrial power tools and solutions ranging from handheld tools to automated systems. Our customers are some of the largest manufacturers in industries such as automotive, aerospace, energy, electronics and industrial assembly.

The ideal partner can help Atlas Copco develop and supply products or subsystems for handling screws for an automated assembly solution. Potential solutions can solve either the end-to-end screw sorting and feeding problem or its subproblems. Atlas Copco targets to automate more than 10,000 systems over the next five years. As a development partner to Atlas Copco, you will have the possibility to drive industry automation further also after this opportunity.

Focus Areas

Examples of solutions we’re interested in

Flexible automation

The system should be flexible enough to handle different screw types and sizes for different vehicle models.

Screw feeding

A screw feeding solution that can automatically move and feed screws to an automatic tightening tool and is flexible for different types of screws.

Screw positioning

A hardware or software solution that can help correctly and accurately position screws for an automatic screw gun.

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