Q5D
Additive manufacturing wire harness automation equipment manufacturer Q5D has secured 918,169 GBP in grant funding to further the develop the software that drives its CY1000 wiring automation robotic cell.
The company launched its CY1000 robotic cell in April last year and will now work with the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) and Emixa, a European Siemens Partner, to advance the system's software. Innovate UK has provided the grant funding.
Q5D has designed the CY1000 5-axis CNC robotic handling cell to automate the addition of electrical wiring and terminations in products, with productivity improvements of up to 10x said to be possible. The company's unique ‘Electrical Function Integration’ technology is said to mitigate the need for expensive, heavy, and potentially unreliable wiring harnesses, while offering greater flexibility to product designers, and reducing both manufacturing and supply chain costs. The machine also offers precision polymer deposition and deposition of conductive inks. All of this can be done on complex-shaped surfaces.
The CY1000 system can function on complex-shaped surfaces, but such complex functionality requires sophisticated software. With Innovate UK's grant funding, Q5D will fund the next stage of software development, working with partners to add CAD/CAM capabilities to the machine control and user interface elements it will develop in-house. Emixa has written post processors to the Siemens NX CAD/CAM software to create a digital twin of the hardware and create the machine code needed to control it from CAD designs.
Q5D says that the software is currently functional and useable for experienced CAD/CAM engineered, but the workflow from design to manufacture still requires simplification and the interfaces need to be made more accessible before non-expert customers can utilise it. Using the Innovate UK grant funding, Q5D and Emixa will work to iron out these issues throughout the rest of the year, before deploying it at the MTC to support end-use companies.
