Robot made wheels

philbar72
philbar72 Posts: 2,229
edited June 2013 in Road general
interesting...

http://www.bikeradar.com/road/gear/arti ... on--37550/

i'd still rather go handbuilt.

Comments

  • AchillesLeftKnee
    AchillesLeftKnee Posts: 713
    Very surprised it's taken this long. I've no idea what the economics of it are like, but given that CNC absolutely creams humans in a ton of other fields when it comes to precision, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that setup would go way beyond what a human could achieve.
    Mangeur
  • ugo.santalucia
    ugo.santalucia Posts: 28,321
    Yes interesting... of course he claims that his invention makes robots better than humans and I suppose every robot manufacturer says so or has to believe so.
    In more advanced industries, like aerospace, for instance, the most delicate and accurate jobs are still done by hand, like balancing a large turbo fan in a jet engine etc... computers assist, an expert engineer finishes the work by hand. I doubt the wheel making industry has suddenly become more advanced the the aerospace one.

    That said, even if that was the case, unfortunately this machine will be routed to build underengineered wheels by design, as the push for profit and the constant demand for new products result in lots and lots of Frankenstein along the way to "progress".
    left the forum March 2023
  • MountainMonster
    MountainMonster Posts: 7,423
    ugo.santalucia wrote:
    Yes interesting... of course he claims that his invention makes robots better than humans and I suppose every robot manufacturer says so or has to believe so.
    In more advanced industries, like aerospace, for instance, the most delicate and accurate jobs are still done by hand, like balancing a large turbo fan in a jet engine etc... computers assist, an expert engineer finishes the work by hand. I doubt the wheel making industry has suddenly become more advanced the the aerospace one.

    That said, even if that was the case, unfortunately this machine will be routed to build underengineered wheels by design, as the push for profit and the constant demand for new products result in lots and lots of Frankenstein along the way to "progress".

    I can see your point, but I do not think it has anything to do with being more advanced. There is a lot more to lose if the turbo fan on a plane is misaligned or not in properly than of spokes coming loose.
    My London Road
  • ugo.santalucia
    ugo.santalucia Posts: 28,321
    MountainMonster wrote:
    ugo.santalucia wrote:
    Yes interesting... of course he claims that his invention makes robots better than humans and I suppose every robot manufacturer says so or has to believe so.
    In more advanced industries, like aerospace, for instance, the most delicate and accurate jobs are still done by hand, like balancing a large turbo fan in a jet engine etc... computers assist, an expert engineer finishes the work by hand. I doubt the wheel making industry has suddenly become more advanced the the aerospace one.

    That said, even if that was the case, unfortunately this machine will be routed to build underengineered wheels by design, as the push for profit and the constant demand for new products result in lots and lots of Frankenstein along the way to "progress".

    I can see your point, but I do not think it has anything to do with being more advanced. There is a lot more to lose if the turbo fan on a plane is misaligned or not in properly than of spokes coming loose.
    The article clearly points out that his robot does a more accurate job than a man and I argue that... I argue that where precision is involved normally computer does the donkey work and man finishes off rather than the other way round.

    Then I don't quite understand when he talks about wheels traditionally being built by prisoners... I am not aware of this reality, but if it was real, well it would not be a bad thing to give them a skill.

    Basically his robot might be amazing, but he is full of sxxt... :wink:
    left the forum March 2023
  • Bar Shaker
    Bar Shaker Posts: 2,313
    Modern robots (machines) will achieve accuracy at least as good as the very best human technician and far better than most. Not only that, but they will do it consistently and will do it, as the article says, four or five times more quickly.

    If the task is repetitive, a man armed with a drill is no match for a modern CNC machine.

    For one off tasks, a human will always be quicker.
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  • ugo.santalucia
    ugo.santalucia Posts: 28,321
    Bar Shaker wrote:
    Modern robots (machines) will achieve accuracy at least as good as the very best human technician and far better than most. Not only that, but they will do it consistently and will do it, as the article says, four or five times more quickly.

    If the task is repetitive, a man armed with a drill is no match for a modern CNC machine.

    For one off tasks, a human will always be quicker.

    The problem is that it is not a repetitive task... each rim is an individual and no rim is perfect... they all have inaccuracies and you have to build to compensate for that... same applies to spokes.
    If I kept repeating the same procedure over and over I would end up with inconsistent wheels and all different. There are a number of steps where decisions are involved. Of course the robot can be instructed to have a mind of its own and take decisions based on rim parameters, going through several checks, but it still does not explain why all the delicate operations where decisions are involved are never left to robots.
    A robot can safely operate an aircraft in 90% of the cases, but when the situation gets complicated, there is no such thing as an auto pilot, it is still the human who takes control. In other words, a robot can be instructed, but can he learn from its mistakes and improve? Does it have the flexibility to take radical decisions? I am not sure...
    left the forum March 2023
  • slowbike
    slowbike Posts: 8,498
    ugo.santalucia wrote:
    A robot can safely operate an aircraft in 90% of the cases, but when the situation gets complicated, there is no such thing as an auto pilot, it is still the human who takes control.
    I understand that the fly-by-wire aircraft are NEVER in direct control of the human pilot - it will take their input instructions and check them against set parameters before deciding to apply them or not.

    Wheel making isn't that technically difficult - once you've selected the rim/hub/spokes - and it doesn't take much of a programmer to come up with a set of instructions. With the right tools & programming the machine can easily churn out bog standard wheels faster than a human on the same build.
    You may occasionally get a duff rim, hub or spoke that the machine cannot resolve - so the easy answer is to reject that wheel and get on with the next one.
    The human benefit is the ability to see beyond the set instructions - so they pick up the rejects and bin the duff parts and rework the rest of the wheel (if feasible).
  • ugo.santalucia
    ugo.santalucia Posts: 28,321
    Slowbike wrote:
    You may occasionally get a duff rim, hub or spoke that the machine cannot resolve - so the easy answer is to reject that wheel and get on with the next one.

    You would be left with a very low yield... or with severe limitations on the kind of rims that can be built... basically heavy deep rims with welded joint, ruling out pretty much everything else.
    Of course rim manufacturing could be improved to make them "more perfect", but I suppose that would result in huge costs (not that a Mavic Ksyrium rim is cheap... )
    left the forum March 2023
  • slowbike
    slowbike Posts: 8,498
    So you're suggesting that most of the rims are duff?! That I doubt ..

    what sort of defects that a machine cannot cope with are you talking about?
  • rolf_f
    rolf_f Posts: 16,015
    Slowbike wrote:
    You may occasionally get a duff rim, hub or spoke that the machine cannot resolve - so the easy answer is to reject that wheel and get on with the next one.

    This. Which is of course how carbon frames are made. Even the likes of Dogmas will be banged out of moulds in seconds and rejected rather than refettled like a genuine handmade product would be. The truth is that the handbuilt product will be less perfect than the equivalent machine made item - personally, if the price is similar, I'd rather pay for the item that took time and care to be built. But I don't fool myself into believing that being handbuilt makes the item functionally superior.

    The benefit that handbuilt wheels have over those made by this machine is the bespoke (apologies!) aspect - the ability to design a wheel for a specific purpose. Not the mechanics of tension and trueness etc.
    Faster than a tent.......
  • Bar Shaker
    Bar Shaker Posts: 2,313
    ugo.santalucia wrote:
    Bar Shaker wrote:
    Modern robots (machines) will achieve accuracy at least as good as the very best human technician and far better than most. Not only that, but they will do it consistently and will do it, as the article says, four or five times more quickly.

    If the task is repetitive, a man armed with a drill is no match for a modern CNC machine.

    For one off tasks, a human will always be quicker.

    The problem is that it is not a repetitive task... each rim is an individual and no rim is perfect... they all have inaccuracies and you have to build to compensate for that... same applies to spokes.
    If I kept repeating the same procedure over and over I would end up with inconsistent wheels and all different. There are a number of steps where decisions are involved. Of course the robot can be instructed to have a mind of its own and take decisions based on rim parameters, going through several checks, but it still does not explain why all the delicate operations where decisions are involved are never left to robots.
    A robot can safely operate an aircraft in 90% of the cases, but when the situation gets complicated, there is no such thing as an auto pilot, it is still the human who takes control. In other words, a robot can be instructed, but can he learn from its mistakes and improve? Does it have the flexibility to take radical decisions? I am not sure...

    That is just not the case and you really should read up on modern CNC capacity if you think it is.

    Modern car engines are a perfect example. They now last much longer than they did even 10 years ago, because they are robot machined and assembled, both to far higher tolerances that humans could acheive.

    Modern casting and CNC techniques mean every rim and spoke will be identical to within hundreds of a percent. Long gone are the days of hand forging and chiselling/pulling/sanding/cutting parts out of lumps of raw metal. The ability to measure at multiple points, for multiple different values, whilst tensioning spokes will mean a far better job in far less time.

    Rather than try to overcome a spoke that is at, say, 96% of the intended tensile strength, a machine will reject the wheel and a human will then change the offending spoke and re-load it. The end products will all be of a uniformly higher standard and will have a far lower unit cost.

    There is still a a market for hand built (always will be) but I feel it has become for those that consider the hand built factor adds character, rather than the hand built method being the best technically. The CNC components of all wheels, hand or robot assembled, have become uniform. The hand built process will inevitably introduce some differences and that can be considered as uniqueness or called character.

    I do not see machines as limiting the quality of materials that can be used, I see this as the total opposite. The yield of products will be far higher when the precision of machines is used for the assembly. Machine produced wheels can all be produced to 'perfect' at a cost far lower than an artisan would need to earn.
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  • slowbike
    slowbike Posts: 8,498
    Rolf F wrote:
    The benefit that handbuilt wheels have over those made by this machine is the bespoke (apologies!) aspect - the ability to design a wheel for a specific purpose. Not the mechanics of tension and trueness etc.
    If you read the article, they're indicating that many manufacturers are wanting to build to order - so if spoke tension is a major factor (tbh I have no idea - I've built one wheel and it's waiting for a second truing due to a duff nipple) then that could be factored in at point of order and fed into the machine that builds your wheel - along with choice of rim, hub, spokes etc etc.

    Anything that follows a logical pattern can be automated - sometimes it's worth it, othertimes not. I'd guess in respect of the turbo fan in a jet engine being balanced by hand - 2 points - 1) volume - they're not making 000's of these a day so a robot may not be financially viable and 2) the engineer doing the balancing may also be doing other tasks such as checking the rest of the fan for defects - something that may have to be done manually anyway so may as well get him to complete.
  • ugo.santalucia
    ugo.santalucia Posts: 28,321
    Slowbike wrote:
    So you're suggesting that most of the rims are duff?! That I doubt ..

    what sort of defects that a machine cannot cope with are you talking about?

    Well, it is simple... you align your spoke threads, then you tension all your spokes exactly the same... if everything was perfect, then the wheel should be true, right? it hardly ever is. You only need half a turn of a thread to change completely the tension... half a thread is a tiny tiny fraction of one mm in length, which means every small defect in a rim is amplified. Some rims are better than others, as an average, but you will find a small minority of rims build to perfection... most of the job is compensating for tiny rim defects.
    General rule is the deeper the rim, the more chances it has to build perfect... heavier rims build better than lighter rims, wider rims build better than narrower rims, welded rims build better than pin joined rims.

    Note that "build better" doesn't mean "build a better wheel", it just means one that is quicker/easier to built to accurate standards...
    left the forum March 2023
  • ugo.santalucia
    ugo.santalucia Posts: 28,321
    Bar Shaker wrote:
    Modern casting and CNC techniques mean every rim and spoke will be identical to within hundreds of a percent.

    Metal rims are extruded then bent and joined and spokes are extruded, then drawn and rolled... there is no CNC or precision casting involved... you can change the manufacturing process of the above, but I suspect CNC or casting have no role, whichever way you want to see it
    left the forum March 2023
  • slowbike
    slowbike Posts: 8,498
    ugo.santalucia wrote:
    Well, it is simple... you align your spoke threads, then you tension all your spokes exactly the same... if everything was perfect, then the wheel should be true, right? it hardly ever is. You only need half a turn of a thread to change completely the tension... half a thread is a tiny tiny fraction of one mm in length, which means every small defect in a rim is amplified.
    Really - do you not think that they'd check the rim for trueness in a similar fashion to the human method? Did you watch the video?!
    ugo.santalucia wrote:
    Note that "build better" doesn't mean "build a better wheel", it just means one that is quicker/easier to built to accurate standards...
    Correct - the wheel is only as good as the components and method gone into building it ... for the most part I can see that those wanting bog standard (but expensive) wheels will get on just fine with an automated build. The artisan is going to have to sell his skills in reparing, fettling and building to unusual specifications.

    Don't get me wrong I don't necessarily agree with automation - there's a lot more too it than how is your wheel built - last thing I want to see is another job going abroad - but with a small (!) machine doing individual wheels on a per-order basis I can see that being housed in the country of sale - or close by. That could be good for local business.
  • rolf_f
    rolf_f Posts: 16,015
    Ultimately, technical capability is mostly about time. I reckon I could build a wheel every bit as good as Ugo - but he'd build it in an hour and I'd take a month. Or more! If you have a reasonable degree of non left footedness, what distinguishes most people from the skilled is not the quality of the end product but how long they need to produce it.

    So, the question is 1) can the machine, with enough iterations, build a wheel as well as a handbuilt one and 2) how long would it take to do it?

    Given that the way that the machine builds the wheel appears very similar to how one would be handbuilt, albeit that the checking is going to be more precise (eg tension measured in exactly the same way, always at the same position etc) I would have thought it could. And if it can, I'd be prepared to bet that it would do so far more quickly than the skilled artisan.

    Of course, this isn't actually difficult to test......!
    Faster than a tent.......
  • Bar Shaker
    Bar Shaker Posts: 2,313
    ugo.santalucia wrote:
    Bar Shaker wrote:
    Modern casting and CNC techniques mean every rim and spoke will be identical to within hundreds of a percent.

    Metal rims are extruded then bent and joined and spokes are extruded, then drawn and rolled... there is no CNC or precision casting involved... you can change the manufacturing process of the above, but I suspect CNC or casting have no role, whichever way you want to see it

    An extruded rim will be cut to a length accurate to hundreds of a mm by a CNC machine. It will then be bent around a last/former by another CNC machine, which applies the correct pressure to ensure the force achieving the wrap is uniform and applied in exactly the right plane to prevent warping. Another CNC machine will then drill the spoke holes and valve hole at positions that are within fractions of a mm.

    In the case of a Mavic extruded rim, it will be extruded too fat and then a CNC mill will remove the material where it is not needed, away from the spoke location points.

    Surely you should know this.
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  • drlodge
    drlodge Posts: 4,826
    If you could write a logical algorithm that specified how to build the perfect wheel, Robots could beat humans. BUT, its not that simple, since there are many variables that have to be balanced. The most obvious is between even spoke tension and a true wheel. You can have one or the other, but not both, so how would you program a Robot to achieve the right balance?
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  • slowbike
    slowbike Posts: 8,498
    drlodge wrote:
    If you could write a logical algorithm that specified how to build the perfect wheel, Robots could beat humans. BUT, its not that simple, since there are many variables that have to be balanced. The most obvious is between even spoke tension and a true wheel. You can have one or the other, but not both, so how would you program a Robot to achieve the right balance?
    Er - spoke tension within set tolerance and a wheel that's true ... ?

    Just ask yourself - how does a person achieve it ...

    There is so much repetitiveness in wheel building that it isn't hard to see how you could build and programme a machine to do it. Set the parameters including tolerances and away you go.

    The tricky bit is knowing what parameters are needed for each rim/hub/spoke combination - and ensuring your machine doesn't go and break the expensive bits of kit!
  • dennisn
    dennisn Posts: 10,601
    drlodge wrote:
    If you could write a logical algorithm that specified how to build the perfect wheel, Robots could beat humans. BUT, its not that simple, since there are many variables that have to be balanced. The most obvious is between even spoke tension and a true wheel. You can have one or the other, but not both, so how would you program a Robot to achieve the right balance?

    There are those things called tolerances and I would guess that no machine or man can get away from them. Something(i.e. spoke tension, etc.) simply has to be more or less
    than it's next door neighbor to make the rest of the parts work.

    The perfect wheel, like everything and everyone striving to be perfect, is basically a fantasy.

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