Bavaria’s State-of-the-Art Engineering
Bavaria. It’s a southern state of Germany known for it’s rich culture including Oktoberfest and Lederhosen. But what’s also interesting is how much of an economic success Bavaria is. If the state were to secede and become it’s own country (which many Bavarians wish to do), Bavaria would have the 18th largest GDP in the world. Not too bad for a region which only has 12.5 million inhabitants. That’s less than the roughly 18 million people living in the New York metropolitan area. Bavaria has one of the strongest economies in the world, home to companies such as Adidas, Puma, Siemens, KUKA, BMW, and Audi.
BMW, which stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Works) is headquartered here in Munich about a five-minute walk from where I live. The original BMW plant from 1922 is situated right next to the headquarters, smack-dab in the middle of the city. This is where most of the world’s BMW 3 series cars are manufactured, and also where I visited yesterday. Once again, we were not allowed to take pictures, but I found some footage on YouTube, which is posted below. I’m not really sure how this footage exists, but since I’m not hosting it, I don’t really care.
As you can see from the video, BMW uses robots to do most of the welding, painting, and larger assembly of the vehicle body. The most impressive display was in the body shop, where the actual frames of the cars are welded together. In this area, there were four or so different workspaces all assembling different parts of the car. In each workspace, somewhere between six and twelve (yes twelve!) robots were working together. I know from taking a course in robot motion planning that this is no small feat. To coordinate twelve robots moving all together in the same workspace requires extremely careful planning, as the slightest error can result in a collision.
Each cycle of production in the body shop lasts sixty seconds at a maximum, so the robots are working on a new car every minute. Keep in mind that the pieces of metal that the robots are picking up are the size of entire cars. When you consider this, the speed, agility, and accuracy of these robots is absolutely astounding. My favorite comment on YouTube for that video is “That would be such a fun job designing all of those robots.” Why yes, yes it would.
Most of the robots in the BMW plant are made by KUKA, which is one of the worlds most well-known robotics companies. KUKA is based in Augsburg, which is a short thirty minute train ride away from Munich. The short train ride is of course due to the high-speed German trains built by Siemens, also based in Munich. The products that come out of Bavarian companies speak for themselves in terms of quality. Who’d have thought that the same place that brings you some of the worlds best beer is also home to some of the worlds best engineers? Coincidence?