AMR accelerates into the power battery "track"

The demand for upgrading the intelligent manufacturing of power batteries and reducing costs has opened up a path for AMR (autonomous mobile robots) to enter the lithium battery automated production line on a large scale.

On the one hand, the front, middle and back-end processes of lithium battery manufacturing require equipment reliability, stability and high-precision process control, as well as the need for intelligent processing of production data, which forces power battery production lines to upgrade to automation and intelligentization.

As an important part of the intelligent upgrade solution, AMR can play a positive role in the intelligent manufacturing process of power batteries.

On the other hand, a new wave of power battery capacity expansion has been set off worldwide since 2020. Battery companies including CATL, AVIC Lithium, BYD, Honeycomb Energy, EVE Energy, and Ruipu Energy have expanded their battery production capacity on a large scale, releasing huge demand for lithium battery equipment procurement, which has brought good development opportunities to upstream automation equipment manufacturers and system integrators.

The planning and construction of new factories and new production lines also provide favorable conditions for AMR to assist in the automation of power battery logistics, improve production efficiency and promote flexible manufacturing.

Industry insiders believe that the continued growth in orders for power battery companies has led to the expansion of production, and the requirements for flexibility, digitization, and intelligence of new production lines continue to increase. Compared with traditional automated mobile equipment, mobile robots represented by AMR can be better deployed quickly and flexibly on production lines, and form a closed data flow loop, thus gaining the attention of more and more lithium battery companies.

However, the intelligent manufacturing of power batteries currently faces many pain points. There is still a long way to go before AMR can be widely used in the field of power batteries. AMR companies also face many challenges in entering the new energy field.

Exploring new opportunities for AMR applications

In order to ensure stable order delivery and capacity expansion, lithium battery companies cannot do without fully automated and intelligent lithium battery production lines. It enables battery factories to ensure that the lithium batteries produced have good consistency, highly reliable safety performance and direct yield while ensuring the lithium battery production process, thereby reducing production costs.

AMR refers to "autonomous mobile robot", a new generation of logistics equipment that is intelligent and leads the process of intelligent manufacturing. In terms of hardware, it integrates high-tech technologies such as multi-sensor fusion, machine vision, and hybrid navigation. The powerful main control gives AMR the ability to drive automatically and make independent decisions.

As AMR continues to mature from technology to products, more and more application opportunities for AMR to replace manual labor on lithium battery production lines are being explored.

Lithium battery manufacturing is generally divided into three major processes: front-end loading, homogenization, coating, rolling, slitting, middle-stage winding, film making, shelling, liquid injection, sealing, and back-end formation, capacity division, PACK, and warehousing and logistics. The production process of each process is different, and the requirements for robots of different categories are different.

Source: Gaogong Industry Research Institute (GGII)

Judging from the current application status, the stacking, welding, packaging and other processes in the middle stage of the lithium battery production process involve many industrial robots because they need to ensure production efficiency and product consistency. The back-end inspection, assembly and PACK also involve many industrial robots because robots can meet the requirements of grasping and carrying larger loads.

Among them, AMR can replace manual labor in the above process sections to transport materials and semi-finished products between processes, making it easier to supervise production materials. The importance of AMR in the connection of lithium battery production line processes and line-side warehouses is increasing day by day.

At present, lithium battery companies are paying more and more attention to the intelligent management of their raw material warehouses, line warehouses and finished product warehouses. Therefore, they are more and more inclined to use automated warehouses to improve the utilization rate of factory space and the convenient storage and access of batteries. At the same time, they use AGV/AMR to realize the transportation of materials and semi-finished products between processes, which is convenient for the supervision of production materials.

In addition, the battery production process is perfectly combined with the automated logistics system. Through special equipment such as storage equipment, conveying equipment, loading area equipment, NG station, etc., the automation and intelligence of the entire battery production process can be realized, achieving the expected indicators of the production enterprise.

However, the front-end processes such as coating, roll changing, rolling, and slitting require high docking accuracy of loading and unloading materials, heavy weight of electrode rolls, and high conveying frequency. Simply relying on manual forklifts for loading and unloading and transportation cannot meet the requirements of intelligent manufacturing of lithium batteries. Therefore, higher product performance requirements are placed on AMR, and the difficulty of introduction is also greater.

"In the transportation of pole coils in processes such as rolling and coating, due to the large weight span (ranging from several hundred kilograms to more than one ton), it is necessary to dock with upstream and downstream equipment, and the docking accuracy is required to be high. If it only relies on manual handling, on the one hand, it is not conducive to improving the company's production efficiency and product yield, and on the other hand, it will also pose a threat to the personal safety of production personnel." Liang Kaixiang, flexible logistics ecology officer of Stand Robotics, told Gaogong Lithium Battery that the requirement to improve production efficiency in the front-end production of lithium batteries provides an opportunity for AMR to replace manual labor.

Industry insiders pointed out that using AMR to replace manual labor on the production line is a development trend in the upgrading of lithium battery intelligent manufacturing. It can realize automatic loading and unloading of materials and automated transportation, reduce the chances of manual contact with battery cell production, realize information interconnection and data collection and uploading between production equipment, and form a highly flexible production line, thereby helping lithium battery companies improve product performance and reduce manufacturing costs.

AMR encounters obstacles in entering the battery production line

Although the level of automation in power battery manufacturing has been greatly improved in recent years, and the automation and intelligence levels of single equipment have been greatly improved, there is still much room for improvement in the high-precision and efficient connection and coordination between equipment.

Under this circumstance, AMR also needs to overcome many difficulties if it wants to introduce power battery production lines on a large scale.

On the one hand, the introduction of AMR into the power battery production line will involve the upgrade and transformation of a certain process or the entire production line, and there is relatively little room for modification of the old production line. The functional design of its production equipment is mainly based on manual operation, and the intelligence and digitization level of the equipment's data output port is not high, resulting in greater difficulty in the interaction with AMR.

Although the new production line can gradually build a framework from the top-level design to reserve space for the introduction of AMR, battery companies may have doubts about the actual benefits of introducing AMR and subsequent after-sales issues, which may also become an obstacle for AMR to enter the lithium battery industry.

A senior technical executive of a power battery company once said that the biggest headache for lithium battery manufacturers is to identify how much water is in the supplier's words, and how much the delivery, quality, performance and other data they provide are exaggerated. If the supplier can do what he says, the product price is often not the most sensitive.

On the other hand, differences in production lines and processes among different types of battery companies lead to differences in equipment functions, which in turn will put forward different requirements for AMR product design. However, there are currently not many AMR suppliers that can meet the diversified non-standard customization needs in the lithium battery field.

Liang Kaixiang pointed out that AMR suppliers need to customize AMR products according to the differences in production lines of different types of battery companies and the battery production process. At the same time, the space and layout of the battery production line must also be considered so that the rotation, detour and other paths can be planned more quickly, thereby improving the usability of customized AMRs.

Create a flexible logistics model for the lithium battery industry

With the further expansion of power battery production capacity and the accelerated upgrading of intelligent manufacturing, mobile robots have ushered in a good opportunity to enter the lithium battery industry in a big way, thus attracting many mobile robot companies to join in.