Toyota Material Handling Manufacturing Italy

Toyota Material Handling Manufacturing Italy, manufacturer of forklifts, needs to fully automate the process of post-processing of the data acquired during the tests of forklifts, to radically reduce the time of analysis and compilation of the report.

Automated Analysis and Generation of Test Reports

The challenge

Toyota performs tests on forklifts on test circuits with the aim of verifying operation and parameters of the components. This analysis requires the acquisition of high-frequency signals from many strain gauge sensors. The acquisition is made through a dedicated system (Vishay 7000).

After the acquisition, given the large amount of acquired data, critical post-processing operations based on a complex algorithm developed by Toyota are requested.

In particular, the post-processing procedure requires the intervention of a technician who, channel by channel, applies the algorithm and compiles a report containing the test data and the obtained results.

Toyota needs to fully automate the process of post-processing of the acquired data, the application of the algorithm and the generation of the test report, so as to drastically reduce the time of analysis and report compiling.  

The solution

To meet the requirements, a custom application perfectly adapted to the needs of Toyota was made.

Since the analysis requires to acquire many high-frequency signals for several minutes, the file containing the data acquired by the strain gauge may have significant dimensions.

The realized application has to manage this file, and was therefore been optimized to handle large amounts of data (even several hundreds of MB).

For each channel, operator can easily define its properties and choose the post processing operations to be performed before the application of calculation algorithm for the data analysis.

After the channel configuration phase, the operator can start the automatic procedure which, without requiring other interventions, applies the algorithm for the data analysis on all the acquired channels and completes the test report.

The application also allows the operator to configure a new test that will be queued after the one that is running.  

Benefits and Results

With the provided solution, the process of post-processing of the acquired data, the application of the algorithm and the compilation of the test report, have been completely automated, drastically reducing the time of the operations.