Chrysler Belvidere Presentation & Guest Judges Presentation

During this meeting, a representatives from Chrysler Belvedere came in and showed our team how they use robotics in their workspace and how they fix problems. Chrysler is a car manufacturing plant, and they use an assembly line to assemble the cars. This means that a lot of automation is involved to better conduct certain tasks like painting the cars. This automation mostly consists of robotic arms and conveyors. Sometimes, though, a certain part of the process breaks and they need to still keep the conveyor line moving. In this case, they send in a group of people who take the place of the arms to do the work while the engineers fix the mechanical problem. 

We learned that the cars’ paint is basically “baked” on them at least three times in the process.  We also learned that their paint arm motors run at 60K RPMs.  The type of paint they use is so sensitive that you can’t even wear certain kinds of perfume, deodorant, or have a silicon cell phone case in your paint area because it could crater the paint.  

Mr. Riviera talked about how important it is to learn how to solve problems and work together as a team in figuring things out.  Mr. Riviera is also a digital system programmer, an electronics engineer, and the plain maintenance supervisor.  He said that sometimes they actually have to recreate accidents that happen on the line in order to figure out what went wrong.  

Mr. Riviera had pre-analyzed our motors and had some suggestions for why we were sometimes having problems.  He also talked about the great opportunities we have to learn skills on this team that he did not have available to him growing up.  

Another thing that we accomplished in this meeting was a practice judge’s presentation with guest judges. The team taught them what we do on the team and our design process, and the judges provided valuable feedback about posture, volume, and how to better answer questions.