BMW Uses Boston Dynamics' Spot Robot to Collect IoT Data

At the BMW Group’s Hams Hall plant, key engine components are machined and three- and four-cylinder gas engines, as well as V8 and V12 engines, are assembled for a range of BMW Group vehicles. These production processes generate a vast amount of data, which often ended up siloed, leaving no bird’s eye view of Hams Hall’s overall operations. 

This created a major operations oversight issue considering that the plant’s three machining lines produce some 1.4 million components per year, while its two engine manufacturing lines produce around 400,000 engines a year. At one point, internal teams used more than 400 custom dashboards to compile data relevant to their specific areas, all of which used different methods of data access. 

These data management issues were a major factor driving Hams Hall to seek single source of truth for this data that would be accessible to all team members.

Two years ago, Hams Hall began an effort to centralize its entire data gathering infrastructure. A key milestone in this project involved the development of a digital twin of the facility.

A complete digital twin of the Hams Hall BMW plant

Creating the digital twin involved integrating more than 15 different IT systems into a three-dimensional model of the factory that team members could access using a smartphone or tablet. The twin now displays live production data using green or red symbols to show the health of a given system inside the factory. 

“By utilizing the digital twin as a no-code platform, we wanted to clean the plant’s landscape of dashboards,” said Christian Poss, BMW Group’s Innovation and Digitalization (I&D) team manager. “We have all the data available and organized for our people [with the digitial twin]. Whenever they have a problem, they don’t need to spend hours finding the right data source and understanding the problem, they can get right on it. Everyone refers to the digital twin now.”

Given the immense amount of machinery required to maintain production at the Hams Hall plant, ensuring the equipment is always working properly is handled through regular inspections. Of particular importance in these inspections are the plant’s extensive tunnel system of pipes, chillers and hydraulic panels that are vulnerable to air leaks. 

The plant’s digital twin revealed areas of the facility where inspection data was missing. However, requiring the Hams Hall maintenance team to conduct manual inspections noted by the digital twin would take hours away from time spent on actual maintenance or repairs. This drew the I&D team to focus on automating these inspection tasks.

The IoT sensor decision: fixed or mobile?

Placing IoT (Internet of Things) sensors on equipment was one option for gathering automated readings, but the I&D team determined it would take years to install all the sensors required, plus it would be too costly. However, a mobile robot — equipped with IoT sensors that could cover the same amount of area, repeating the exact measurements in challenging conditions — could be purchased at a fraction of the cost of numerous IoT sensors.

This led the team to Boston Dynamics’ Spot.

“We have a really good level of transparency now in our production data [with the plant digital twin],” said Brad Tomlinson, technical lead of Hams Hall’s I&D team. “With that transparency we can identify the data gaps and we use Spot to fill those gaps. For example, we didn’t have temperature data about all our assets, or manual dial readings and acoustic anomaly reports down to [certain] specifics. That’s how we’re using Spot.”