arculus

Automotive manufacturing has a problem. Almost every company that sells a physical product today uses a production line. The scale at which this is done is gargantuan, as manufacturing is one of the world’s biggest industries, with an annual value estimated at $8.3 trillion and a workforce of 300 million (according to Brookings). Yet these production lines haven’t changed much since Henry Ford developed the techniques of mass production in the early 20th century. They’re run with conveyor belts and rigid processes that are designed upfront.

This linear process can’t keep up as demand for customisation increases and innovation accelerates. Different units take different amounts of time at various stages of the process, and the result is that the whole process becomes as slow as its slowest step. For an industry this large, the inbuilt inefficiencies this implies are enormous.

arculus transforms the one-dimensional assembly line into scalable, flexible assembly modules, loosely coupled via real-time control software. Optionally this can utilise an in-house autonomous mobile robot they have developed, known as an “Arculee”. Instead of a single line with a conveyor belt, a factory enabled with arculees is made up of modules in which individual tasks are performed and the robots move objects between these modules automatically based on which stations are free at that moment.

Ultimately, arculus’s solution affects factory efficiency or product output by increasing worker and machine utilization, decreasing physical space requirements, and optimizing planning time and logistics costs.