How Robot NASCAR are helping to improve teams, fast race cars

Nascar The season kicks with a race this year Historical Boman Gray StadiumWhich had not seen a NASCAR Cup series race since 1971. While the parking lot Padock back of the fieldhouse returned in those early days of stock car racing, some 40-plas years ago, cars in the garage were away from those who gathered in the backyard garage of the 1970s.

Differences made over my time were further clarified Hendric motorsports A few days later. Before entering a shop on the Handric Campus, it seems that NASA’s production facility is being provided access to the car assembly (instead of rockets), complete with ancient epoxy floor and stainless steel plates. And when you travel deeply in the shop you will find a metrology lab, with an array of robots that are measuring the best parts for a car for a car for thousandth (0.000) for the next set of cars for the next race.

You quickly find out that the construction of a race car is almost like the construction of a rocket, all to find out what benefits you can get against your opponents and rivals.

Building rocket … on wheels

About 85% of the parts used to make NASCAR Cup cars should come from a single source supplier. Teams need to use these parts from the supplier. However, they are allowed to choose how they add parts during the assembly and this is where the performance can be found.

According to Hendric Motisports, the vice president of the competition Chad Nos, it is important to find speed.

“They want to keep a set of tolerance, which everyone has to work inside and it is above us to take tolerance, pile up them in such a way that makes the performance, which makes anything metric that we determine that we determine what is the most important performance for that track and what to apply what to apply, which we are for geometry.

For example, each NASCAR car number is allocated a set of primary chassis pieces: seven center sections, ten front clips and ten rear clips. Therefore, a four car team like Hendric motorsports has to live with measurements for more than a hundred of these pieces and will stack them for other individual components who are bolts for them. This is the place where Knaus sees the greatest ability to use some of this automatic measuring devices.

“It helps us to guess where we feel that once we will keep the components together and then after keeping the components together we can go back and re -confirm that our mathematics meets reality. We do with every one week, with every week, so as you can imagine it is very difficult.”

Measuring these parts begins with hexagon, a company that especially manufactures robots for such efforts, and its full arm – a flexible tool that can use a technician touch probing and laser scanning to create an accurate CAD model of any given part. A large part of the center section is examined and as soon as they come and are added to the databases of their parts. NASCAR allows for tolerance of 0.150 inch in its AT-track inspection scan. Handrick is capable of obtaining accuracy of less than 0.010 inches in its shop scan and is the room that allows them to gather parts on the edge of the rules to maximize the performance.

But once we reach the depth in the shop in the metrology lab, the real capacity appears. It is equipped with a newly launched lab robotic scanner, requiring very little intervention and this suspension can automatically scan components such as uprites or brackets.

A hexagon tempo robot with a trickery arm that sits in a corner of its metrology lab and the control is loaded with a drawer in the hand growing brackets. I see that the tempo opens a drawer and then uses a hand to take one of these growing brackets and place it on the touch+ coordination machine (CMM) that was attached to it. Touch+ identified the bracket and immediately grabbed an investigation on its behalf and began to measure.

The measurement starts filling the output on the pass screen. Once the bracket is measured the ISS, the robotic arm picks it up and keeps it back in the drawer. After measuring all the brackets in the first drawer, the robotic arm closes the drawer and opens the next one. The only intervention required from a technician is loading all the drawers first a day. Once all the brackets are measured, their dimensions are exported from the machine and to a database that feeds a variety of equipment for hendric engineers and mechanics. The most important of them is their simulation software that allows them to make a car for a specific body and suspension measurement.

From virtual to reality – a new, fast car

These scans can cause a thousandth of one thousandth of an inch difference between two brackets measured by a suspension geometry that is equal to the speed on the track.

So, dozens of suspension growing brackets are now available to the engineer who are virtually building a car for a specific track. All measured parts are drawn from the database and once the car is almost almost formed, the information can be shared with mechanics to make the real world car.

Parts are identified by QR code and serial numbers, making them easier to identify for mechanics. They are tasked to collect cars on those large stainless steel plates, where once they are worked, they will use one of 33 hexagon absolute weapons around their convenience to measure the assembled car and will ensure that it matches the virtual model. Once the entire car is measured, the software will show any variation that is then investigated and brought to the imagination (if necessary). This is an absolutely technique-lover approach when you realize that race cars were traditionally done with things such as string or lasers. But in Hendric, they rely on full weapons to verify those tight tolerance. Any additional changes in suspension are verified only by re -starting those suspension components.

For many years the next gene car has resulted in a collection of parts available for handrics as a result of racing and being able to list them accurately in their database allows them to constantly manufacture sharp cars. Not only do they list new parts, but they resume the same parts once they tear the race cars after a race. This not only allows them to keep a large collection, but can also suggest that any part may be damaged or out of tolerance after looking at the track.

While the hendric motorsports have a comprehensive database of parts from the years of scanning all of them, the job has not yet ended. The new robotic tools, which are given for the final decline, require another round of scanning. The quality control supervisor of Hendric Motorsports Roy Serpe shared with the motorcyst.com during his visit, “For the last two or three months, we are trying to measure many parts because we can just verify what we have said because we were using two people, we just understand what we are doing.” What we are doing. “

In addition to those 33 absolute weapons, hendric also uses seven cm and 13 scanners from hexagon and continues to expand those abilities with the launch of its new hexagon metrology lab. With all this technology at its disposal, it is not really surprising why a team like Hendric does so well when talking about the day of the race.