Honda Canada Mfg. Open House 2025

Tailgate Install

Door Install

Why?

At Honda we are lucky to have access to cobots that are used for demos/open houses. This year one of our demos was a 3D-printed CR-V assembly, which grabs small car parts out of your hand using a robot arm and places them on the car.

What?

I helped design an end effector. It uses magnets to attract the parts (the parts have magnets inside of them) and a rack and pinion to push them off. Everything is 3D-printed because its cheap and easy to prototype with.

Design diagram

Halfway through the build

How?

The servo controls work by using the GPIOs available on the UR10e controller to talk to the Arduino Nano. The UR5e sends an analog output voltage to the Arduino, and depending on that voltage, the Arduino commands the servo to a specific position. We had to use an intermediate arduino because the UR10e does not have onboard PWM capabilities at the speed we needed to command the servo.

Courtesy of my number one source ChatGPT

Picking/placing the part on the was done using ARUCO tags to detect where the car part is relative to the robot, and then move towards it to try and pick it up. Using the unique ID on the ARUCO tag, we could differentiate between a hood, tailgate, front/rear doors, etc… My teammates worked on the robot controls and had an 100% success rate during demo day.