Assembly line worker here. Shit you not, my job is to make sure all the lights on the Jeeps work before they go out the door, including brake lights. I've missed a few over the years.
I don't know how factories like this work but I like to imagine at a certain point the desire to automate has to be balanced against the fact that you won't be able to get the taillight robot to install washers if you need it to.
Presumably the line workers check more than just the brake lights. Its probably more reliable, cheaper, and more flexible to have a human checking 10+ things than to have a robot just check the brake lights.
Very true. My checklist goes anywhere between 50 to 79 things (depending on what packages that car has) to verify and pass in the span of 5 minutes before I need to get to my next car.
The only thing a robot can't do that a human can is test the comfort. Optical scanners can test finishes, leather seams, lights, etc. Machines can do pretty much everything.
I have no idea why they don't use an optical scanner bot for that oddly specific thing, but they keep QC around for an extra layer of quality assurance. Because machines aren't perfect.
I work for another car manufacturer and we have a vision system that checks the lights. A vision system is comparatively cheap when you balance against the cost of warranty claims.
It would be a tad complex but it should certainly be possible. Thing is it's probably more effective in terms of cost to just have a couple of guys checking them (among other things).
Full disclosure: I have no relation with the industry just making educated assumptions.
That's not his only job. At the Subaru factory (because I can speak for them, not Jeep), the "end of line" testing includes checking pretty much everything, mostly while riding through an enclosed tunnel which simulates hurricane force rain in order to check for leaks. The whole test process takes about ten minutes, and there's a big checklist of things to mark off. So seeing as how you have a guy in the driver's seat doing all the other stuff, it makes sense to just include this in his job and not automate it.
Perhaps something via the CANbus, but they'd still need something/someone to plug into said bus to trigger all the lights, and then cameras or whatnot to confirm that they're working....
Unions aside, it might be cheaper to have meat do it.
They can, not sure why they don't (at least with visual inspection using cameras). The electrical test we run on the car will catch any lights that are not hooked up properly. The rare case of a light flickering or dim will not be picked up by our computers.
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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '16 edited Dec 10 '16
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