Ford brings the future to life with new Advanced Manufacturing Centre

Inside the Ford Advanced Manufacturing Centre, an engineer stands in front of a 3D printing machine churning out brake parts for the soon-to-be-introduced Shelby Mustang GT500.

Across the room, two team members strap on virtual reality headsets to design and simulate production lines, while another is working alongside a collaborative robot, programming a safer way to install a vehicle part.

These technologies are no longer simply a Hollywood vision of the future for Ford, which has been breaking new ground in auto production for more than a century. And this is all happening every day under one roof at the company's new $62 million Advanced Manufacturing Centre in Redford.

The Advanced Manufacturing Centre has 23 3D printing machines and is working with 10 3D manufacturing companies. This allows Ford experts to develop applications with different materials - from sand to nylon powder to carbon. One application currently under development has the potential to save the company more than $2.7 million.

While millions of children catch fictional animals or capture portals in popular augmented reality video games, Ford is banking on augmented and virtual reality to help it simulate and design assembly lines to build millions of vehicles. Ford experts don specialised gaming equipment and configure a virtual reality production line without ever leaving the Advanced Manufacturing Centre, allowing them to identify potentially hazardous manoeuvres and fine tune workflows long before an assembly line is constructed.

Ford has made significant advances during the last few years with collaborative robots - also known as cobots - with more than 100 of them in 24 Ford plants globally. These cobots are smaller and can work safely alongside people, without protective cages. These cobots also help Ford reduce costs by eliminating the need for expensive safety cages that larger robots require for safety reasons. Utilising cobots in the Advanced Manufacturing Centre allows the company to identify and address potential production issues before the cobots are installed in plants.