Robotics Meets NASCAR
For all the technology that goes into stock-car racing, NASCAR remains a labor-intensive competition, as each race car chassis is welded together by hand. That will change this year when Evernham Motorsports becomes the first Nextel Cup team to use robotics to aid in building racecars.
Ray Evernham, the team owner, said Thursday that he would spend about $250,000 to $350,000 to purchase automated equipment that would assemble small parts and ultimately be used to weld the frame of the “Car of Tomorrow,” a racecar that NASCAR will introduce this year.
“In theory, we can now start to make jigs and fixtures and use robotics to weld, which will stop me from having to increase the number of people I have and put people on things like making the car go faster,” Evernham said during a preseason news conference. “It will cut the costs.
“We’re following the manufacturing process of most industries. We’re a sports team, but we’re really a small manufacturing company now. We build probably 30 cars a year, and it will go up.”
Evernham said that he hoped to build complete racecars for other teams, like Petty Enterprises, to use in competition.
Evernham Motorsports is the only Dodge team to attempt this approach. Officials at Toyota, Ford and General Motors said they have also considered adding robotics for their race teams. But they have decided against the move so far.
“We looked at completely automating it, putting a tremendous amount of science in it and basically taking all the hand labor out of it: an assembly line kind of thing, highly automated, robots,” Dan Davis, the director of Ford Racing Technology, said earlier this month. “And obviously, that would take all those welders and fabricators, put them out of a job. When it got all said and done, it was pretty much a wash in terms of the labor cost to put these things together. It turned out to my surprise the hand-labor approach is going to be or was as good as a robotic approach.”(nytimes.com)
For all the technology that goes into stock-car racing, NASCAR remains a labor-intensive competition, as each race car chassis is welded together by hand. That will change this year when Evernham Motorsports becomes the first Nextel Cup team to use robotics to aid in building racecars.
Ray Evernham, the team owner, said Thursday that he would spend about $250,000 to $350,000 to purchase automated equipment that would assemble small parts and ultimately be used to weld the frame of the “Car of Tomorrow,” a racecar that NASCAR will introduce this year.
“In theory, we can now start to make jigs and fixtures and use robotics to weld, which will stop me from having to increase the number of people I have and put people on things like making the car go faster,” Evernham said during a preseason news conference. “It will cut the costs.
“We’re following the manufacturing process of most industries. We’re a sports team, but we’re really a small manufacturing company now. We build probably 30 cars a year, and it will go up.”
Evernham said that he hoped to build complete racecars for other teams, like Petty Enterprises, to use in competition.
Evernham Motorsports is the only Dodge team to attempt this approach. Officials at Toyota, Ford and General Motors said they have also considered adding robotics for their race teams. But they have decided against the move so far.
“We looked at completely automating it, putting a tremendous amount of science in it and basically taking all the hand labor out of it: an assembly line kind of thing, highly automated, robots,” Dan Davis, the director of Ford Racing Technology, said earlier this month. “And obviously, that would take all those welders and fabricators, put them out of a job. When it got all said and done, it was pretty much a wash in terms of the labor cost to put these things together. It turned out to my surprise the hand-labor approach is going to be or was as good as a robotic approach.”(nytimes.com)
