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At a glance
Challenge
Tire-changing is hard work. The manipulation and removal of tires are cumbersome and can easily lead to damage to the car or the wheels when executed by humans. An automation system must have an accurate, high-quality vision that can cope with different wheel types and environments.
Solution
Industrial robots take the heavy lifting out of the equation, and with the Zivid 2 3D camera mounted on the robot, it can capture the scene with the visual detail and depth acuity it needs. RoboTire’s advanced AI algorithms make the system fully autonomous and can adapt to all types of vehicles it encounters.
Result
RoboTire is disrupting the automotive industry; the change of tires has been carried out the same way since the car’s arrival. Now, Robotire’s autonomous solution is paving the way across North America for a new solution. For fleets and auto repair service providers, RoboTire has made the world of vehicle maintenance easier.
This system encounters a huge array of different situations with different vehicle types with different wheels and tires. Shiny, metallic wheel nuts are about the most challenging thing for a 3D sensor. Zivid 2 performs admirably in the face of such uncertainty.”
Benjamin Wilson, Operations Senior Manager of Robotire
03 Solution
RoboTire chose the Zivid 2 industrial 3D camera as their vision solution. This centered around the need for extreme accuracy and an ability to handle a vast variety of scenarios. It necessitated a 3D machine vision system that was designed to excel whilst mounted on the robot’s arm and always produce top-notch results. As the tire-changing scenarios the system had to cope with had so many variables, they had to have very detailed high-quality point clouds. In addition, the wheel nuts presented one of the biggest challenges in industrial machine vision, how to capture detailed high-quality point clouds from shiny metallic parts. The Zivid 2 3D camera had the high dynamic range (HDR) capabilities to meet this challenge with a dynamic range of over 100 dB.
Robotire's wheel-changing system with a Zivid 2 3D camera
Another factor was the calibration stability of the 3D camera. There is a lot of temperature variation with bay doors opening and closing temperature variations and vibrations would be commonplace. These are all things that will make a 3D sensor system drift if it isn’t designed to cope with such conditions. Fortunately, Zivid 3D cameras are called industrial for a good reason as Zivid design, build, and test each one for calibration resilience, and stability. RoboTire uses advanced AI as a part of its part recognition system for locating the wheel nuts and that AI relies heavily on the accuracy and consistency of the images and point clouds it receives from Zivid 2.
04 Result
The system from RoboTire is proving itself with great success on its first deployments. Operators can now focus on other valuable tasks and leave the heavy lifting to the automated tire-changing system from RoboTire. The typical time it takes for the system to change four tires on a car is under 20 minutes, which is very comparable to how fast a human could do it. But perhaps most importantly, this system provides a level of accuracy and repeatability that humans cannot match. Damage to wheel nuts and cross-threading on the vehicle's hubs is a common problem with human operation. When this happens the damage can involve a brand-new wheel unit which is a considerable unexpected expense and inconvenience for the consumer. The RoboTire system practically eliminates this possibility, leaving happy customers and tire shops alike.
