A leading European motorcycle manufacturer wanted to automate the manual painting of multicoloured decorations on three-dimensional fairing components.
This required significantly higher absolute robot accuracy to process the demanding design surfaces precisely and reproducibly.
A leading European motorcycle manufacturer was looking for a way to efficiently automate the application of multicoloured decorations to three-dimensional fairing components. Previously, the components were manually masked and painted in several steps. This process was time-consuming, dependent on personnel and regularly resulted in variations in quality.
Even the smallest deviations are immediately noticeable on visible design surfaces. The robot’s repeatability was sufficient, but its absolute accuracy was not adequate for this application. Without professional robot calibration, visible misalignments and uneven edges would have been unavoidable.
As part of comprehensive robot calibration, the robot’s entire kinematics were measured with high precision. In this case, absolute accuracy was improved from approximately 1.5 mm to around 0.13 mm. This made precise guidance of the print head along the complex component geometry possible for the first time.
The test installation successfully confirmed the feasibility of automated multicolour printing. Customised decorations could also be applied directly to the components without using stencils or manual rework. Robot calibration created a new automation solution that improves quality, reduces staffing requirements and minimises scrap.
