How to clip a large variety of fasteners into automotive interior pannels ?
Context
Automotive trim clips are plastic or metal fasteners used to secure interior panels, exterior trim, weatherstrips, and other vehicle components.
Produced in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, these clips enable fast and reliable assembly while ensuring secure attachment throughout the vehicle’s lifetime. In automated assembly lines, clips must be precisely inserted into pre-defined positions within interior panels, such as door trims, dashboards, or pillar covers, ensuring proper fit, retention force, and long-term durability.
Challenge
When supplied in bulk, automotive clips present significant feeding challenges due to their diversity in geometry, size, and material. Their complex shapes tend to interlock, overlap, or tangle, making singulation and orientation difficult.
Traditional feeding systems, such as vibratory bowl feeders, often require dedicated tooling and lengthy changeovers for each clip reference, limiting flexibility in high-mix production environments. In addition, feeding issues such as jams or misorientation can disrupt production flow and reduce overall equipment efficiency.
To ensure reliable clipping, each fastener must be singulated, correctly identified, and precisely oriented before insertion. The robot must then pick and clip the part into the panel with controlled force and accuracy, while accommodating part variability and ensuring proper seating without damage to the clip or the panel.
Solution
Asyril’s flexible feeding solutions, combined with a 6-axis robot, automate the singulation, orientation, and presentation of a wide variety of automotive clips for clipping operations. Powered by Asycube, EYE+, and Asyfill, the system ensures consistent part availability and optimal orientation regardless of clip geometry.
The robot accurately picks each clip and inserts it into the interior panel with controlled motion and force, ensuring reliable assembly quality.
This flexible solution minimizes jams, enables rapid changeovers between clip types, and increases production efficiency, allowing manufacturers to handle high-mix applications with improved uptime, reduced costs, and consistent performance.
