BMW
Canvas Category OEM : Automotive
The special fascination of the BMW Group not only lies in its products and technology, but also in the company’s history, written by inventors, pioneers and brilliant designers. Today, the BMW Group, with its 31 production and assembly facilities in 15 countries as well as a global sales network, is the world’s leading manufacturer of premium automobiles and motorcycles, and provider of premium financial and mobility services.
Assembly Line
BMW TechWorks Romania: BMW Group and NTT DATA accelerate digital transformation with new IT hub
The BMW Group is expanding its global network of IT and software hubs with the opening of a new location in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In cooperation with NTT DATA, BMW TechWorks Romania will become the hub for European IT and software projects and will accelerate the company’s digital transformation.
The joint venture will more than double its workforce to 250 developers by the end of the year. In the long term, the aim is to reach a four-digit number of employees in order to consistently expand the BMW Group’s global software expertise. The dynamic growth path is also reflected in ambitious business goals: the aim is to achieve double-digit million turnover by the end of the year.
Figure Status Update - BMW Full Use Case
Autonomous Transport Vehicle Revolutionizes BMW Plant
BMW Group Plant Regensburg has implemented an autonomous transport vehicle, enhancing digitalization and automation in its manufacturing processes. This innovation is a significant stride towards the intelligently connected BMW iFACTORY, with the driverless platform truck autonomously transporting press tools and steel blanks, boasting a payload capacity of up to 55 tonnes. The vehicle’s navigation, facilitated by state-of-the-art sensor technology, ensures precise and autonomous movement within the production facilities, operating at four kilometers per hour.
BMW Group expands use of 3D-printed, customised robot grippers
The BMW Group now also manufactures many work aids and tools for its own production system in various 3D printing processes. From tailor-made orthoses for employees, and teaching and production aids, to large, weight-optimised robot grippers, used for such things as CFRP roofs and entire floor assemblies. At the “Additive Manufacturing Campus” in Oberschleißheim, the BMW Group’s central hub for production, research and training in 3D printing, more than 300,000 parts were “printed” in 2023. Furthermore, over 100,000 printed parts were produced per year across all the plants that form the global production network, from Spartanburg and the German plants to sites in Asia.
Additive manufacturing processes have been used on a daily basis for a long time at BMW Group Plant Landshut. For many years, these have included moulds for the manufacturing of aluminium cylinder heads, which are printed three-dimensionally using the sand casting process. Here, sand is repeatedly applied in thin layers and stuck together using binders. This makes it possible to create moulds for the manufacturing of very complex structures, which are then filled with liquefied aluminium.
For a number of years, the BMW Group’s Lightweight Construction and Technology Centre in Landshut has been using a particularly large gripper element, which was made using the 3D printing process. Weighing around 120 kilograms, the gripper for a robot can be manufactured in just 22 hours and is then used on a press in the production of all CFRP roofs for BMW M GmbH models. The press is first loaded with the CFRP raw material. The gripper is simply rotated 180 degrees to remove the finished roofs. Compared to conventional grippers, the version manufactured using 3D printing was roughly 20 percent lighter, which in turn extend the operating life of the robots and also reduced wear and tear on the system, as well as cutting maintenance intervals. The combined use for two steps also reduced the cycle time. A unique feature of the robot gripper is the ideal combination of two different 3D printing processes. While the vacuum grippers and the clamps for the needle gripper to lift the CFRP raw material are made using selective laser sintering (SLS), the large roof shell and bearing structure are manufactured using large scale printing (LSP). LSP can be used to produce large components economically and sustainably. The process uses injection moulding granules and recycled plastics, while CFRP residual material can also be used and recycled. Compared to the use of primary raw materials, CO2 emissions when manufacturing the gripper are roughly 60 percent lower.
MIT spin-off Rapid Liquid Print raises $7M for 3D printing
MIT spin-off Rapid Liquid Print has raised $7 million in funding for its novel liquid-based 3D printing technology. Boston-based Rapid Liquid Print was founded as an additive manufacturing startup in 2015 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Germany’s HZG Group led the investment round, joined by BMW i Ventures and MassMutual through MM Catalyst Fund (MMCF).
The name of the company says it all: Rapid Liquid Print is a new 3D printing process developed at MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab in Boston. In this innovative process, a liquid object is “drawn” in three dimensions within a gel suspension. A gantry system injects a liquid material mixture into a container filled with a specifically engineered gel, drawing the desired object into three-dimensional space via a nozzle. The gel holds the object in suspension – as if in zero gravity – while the object cures during printing.
The entire printing process takes minutes and requires no additional support structures to be printed. The printed objects can be used immediately without post-processing.
Accelerating industrialization of Machine Learning at BMW Group using the Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) solution
The BMW Group’s Cloud Data Hub (CDH) manages company-wide data and data solutions on AWS. The CDH provides BMW Analysts and Data Scientists with access to data that helps drive business value through Data Analytics and Machine Learning (ML). The BMW Group’s MLOps solution includes (1) Reference architecture, (2) Reusable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules that use Amazon SageMaker and Analytics services, (3) ML workflows using AWS Step Functions, and (4) Deployable MLOps template that covers the ML lifecycle from data ingestion to inference.
Figure announces commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing to bring general purpose robots into automotive production
Figure, a California-based company developing autonomous humanoid robots, announced that it has signed a commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing Co., LLC to deploy general purpose robots in automotive manufacturing environments.
Under the agreement, BMW Manufacturing and Figure will pursue a milestone-based approach. In the first phase, Figure will identify initial use cases to apply the Figure robots in automotive production. Once the first phase has been completed, the Figure robots will begin staged deployment at BMW’s manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Zortrax 3D Printers Used for Manufacturing of BMW Car Parts
Here’s a story of how Krzysztof Urban, an engineer and Zortrax employee, used Zortrax 3D printers to restore his 2006 BMW e91 330d car.
Due to the high quality of both 3D printers and materials, the parts did not require much post-processing. The engineer just used a mini grinder to smooth the 3D prints only where necessary. He then painted the elements with black structural spray paint, choosing such techniques of applying the paint to achieve a structure like that of the factory elements.
BMW i Ventures Announces Investment in German Software Company Ascon Systems.
BMW i Ventures announced today an investment in the innovative German software company Ascon Systems, which is enabling the transformation to the industrial metaverse with digital twins and low-code software solutions. With this commitment, BMW i Ventures is supporting the next stage of digital production, the potential for the industrial metaverse, and digital shopfloor management in the automotive and supplier industry. The common goal is to increase flexibility and efficiency in these important industries.
Ascon Systems & BMW - From Production to Revolution
Automated AM Production Line for Polymer Parts at BMW x DyeMansion, EOS & Grenzebach
Industrialization of Core Printing (ICP) - Pioneering additive serial production
Formant to Use Latest Funding to Hire Experts for Secure Cloud Robotics Platform
Formant today announced the completion of a $21 million funding round. The San Francisco-based company said it plans to use the proceeds to expand hiring across all departments, introduce new products and features, and accelerate growth. BMW i Ventures led Formant’s investment, with participation from new investors Intel Capital, GS Futures. Previous investors, including SignalFire, Hillsven, Pelion Ventures, Holman, Ericsson, Goodyear Ventures, PICUS Capital, and Thursday Ventures, also participated.
Earlier this year, Formant launched Theopolis, an artificial intelligence language interface to enable non-technical users to interact directly with robot data and build visualizations inside its software. Formant claimed that it supports easy integrations with tools such as ROS 2, NVIDIA’s Isaac simulator, and Clearpath’s Outdoor Navigation.
Behind the A.I. tech making BMW vehicle assembly more efficient
BMW Paint Shop with Artificial Intelligence: Automated Rework
Cyclic Materials Raises $27m Series A to Scale Advanced Critical Metals Recycling Technology
Cyclic Materials, an advanced metals recycling company focused on producing critical materials, today announced it has raised $27 million in an oversubscribed Series A financing. The round was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and BMW i Ventures (BiV) and included participation from Fifth Wall, Bioindustrial Innovation Canada (BIC), and existing Cyclic Materials investor Planetary Technologies. This funding round brings the company’s total capital raised to over $30 million and will contribute to the scale up of its technologies.
Joint modelling of the order-dependent parts supply strategies sequencing, kitting and batch supply for assembly lines: insights from industrial practice
Parts can be supplied from warehouses to assembly lines via several production-order-independent and -dependent parts supply strategies. Order-dependent parts supply strategies sequencing, kitting and batch supply share enough similarities that allow joint modelling in picking order planning and execution, whereas line stocking, just-in-time, just-in-sequence and just-in-sequence kit supply require separate modelling. Joint modelling is the precondition for setting up a software system in industrial practice, covering multiple parts supply strategies efficiently. With similar input–output relations and process steps, joint algorithms can be used. This work presents insights from a software system for sequencing, kitting and batch supply implemented in the automotive industry. The main process steps modelled are order-dependent part requests determination, bundling of part requests to picking orders, scheduling and release, and picking and transportation execution. Given the prevalence of assembly lines, sharing knowledge about successful modelling of parts supply strategies is crucial both for practitioners and researchers.
BMW Group Celebrates Opening the World's First Virtual Factory in NVIDIA Omniverse
🚙 Germany-based DeepDrive bags €15M to develop ‘revolutionary’ drive units for EVs
Munich-based DeepDrive, a high-tech company that claims to offer revolutionary drive units for electric vehicles, announced on Tuesday that it has raised €15M in a Series A round of funding. The round was co-led by top mobility investors BMW i Ventures and co-pace GmbH.
Realtime Robotics Now Supplier for BMW Group
Realtime Robotics, the leader in collision-free autonomous motion planning for industrial robots, today announced that it has been named an official supplier for the BMW Group.
AMPECO raises $16M in funding as revenue quadruples year-on-year
We are happy to announce that AMPECO has raised a total of $16M in venture capital investment after having closed a Series A funding round of $13M led by BMW i Ventures. The funding will be used to drive further expansion into North America with a local presence while growing AMPECO’s engineering and product innovation teams.
MacroFab Secures $42M in Growth Financing from Foundry, Edison Partners and BMW i Ventures
MacroFab, the cloud manufacturing platform for building electronics from prototype to high-scale production, with a network of more than 100 factories across North America, announced today $42M in new growth capital. The funding was led by Foundry and joined by BMW i Ventures, as well as existing investors Edison Partners and ATX Venture Partners. With this round of financing MacroFab has raised a total of $82M, enabling the company’s accelerated growth amid the ongoing transformation of global supply chains.
BMW tests 5G positioning with Vodafone and Nokia at Leipzig factory
Vodafone Germany has been busy with private networks for Industry 4.0. A new announcement, with Nokia, says the pair are testing high-accuracy indoor positioning (HAIP) services over a 5G ‘campus network’ (‘campus-netz’) at BMW’s factory in Leipzig, the car maker’s premier site for testing new edge 5G and AI capabilities. The technology is being used to locate machines, tools, cars, and spare parts at the site – with centimetre-level accuracy, in theory.
The new HAIP test project with BMW is intended to increase automation and quality of production at the German car maker’s Leipzig plant. It is focused specifically on two areas, measuring around 4,500 square metres, in the assembly hall and in the logistics centre, said Vodafone. BMW’s Leipzig plant is home to 5,300 employees and produces around 1,000 vehicles per day.
Fox Robotics Announces $20M Investment led by BMW i Ventures
Fox Robotics, the autonomous forklift company, announced today the close of a $20M oversubscribed funding round led by BMW i Ventures. Additional new investors include Zebra Technologies, Japan Airlines & Translink Innovation Fund, and Foothill Ventures. Existing investors Menlo Ventures, ENIAC Ventures, and SignalFire also participated in the round.
Fox is on a mission to deploy its forklifts across warehouses and production environments across the globe and develop new autonomous capabilities to expand use cases. It intends to use the new funds to ramp up production, invest in talent, and expand globally.
BMW plans to invest $1.7 billion in U.S. to produce electric vehicles
BMW Group plans to invest $1.7 billion in its U.S. operations to build electric vehicles and batteries, the company announced Wednesday. The investment will include $1 billion for production of EVs at BMW’s South Carolina plant, and $700 million for a new battery-assembly facility in the state. BMW also announced a deal to purchase battery cells from Japan-based Envision AESC, which will build a new battery cell factory in South Carolina.
BMW i Ventures Leads Series A Investment in Optical AI Technology Company, Alitheon
BMW i Ventures announced today their lead investment in a $10M Series A round for Alitheon, an Optical AI technology company. The company’s FeaturePrint® technology quickly and easily digitizes physical objects for irrefutable identification, authentication, and tracing, and eliminates misidentification and misuse of items. BMW i Ventures previously invested in the company’s seed round and is co-leading this round of investment alongside Imagine Ventures, a Seattle-based venture capital firm.
“The counterfeit crisis is a major cause of concern – not only for economic reasons, but even more as individual safety is concerned,” said Marcus Behrendt, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures. “Alitheon’s cutting-edge technology and ability to bring trust and safety back to supply chains is groundbreaking. After participating in Alitheon’s Seed Funding, we’ve watched the growth of the team and the rising potential of its technology, and are excited to lead its Series A as they bring their product to market.”
ELISE Raises €14.5 million to scale Connected Engineering
We are incredibly proud to announce that we have closed our Series A financing round of €14.5 million! The investment is led by the renowned US Investor Spark Capital, with participation from BMW i Ventures, Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners, and Venture Stars. “This new investment will allow us to make significant progress towards our goal of becoming the low-code standard in engineering. The ease of use of our visual programming language enables engineers to model and automate development processes in the shortest possible time,” explained Moritz Maier, co-founder and CEO of ELISE. “With our open platform, we enable engineers to transfer the agile and efficient methods of software development to hardware development. This automates manual and repetitive tasks and enables companies to manage the growing complexity of product development in the face of increasing cost and innovation pressure.”
BMW Partners with Ansys to Engineer the Future of Autonomous Driving
BMWs to Drive Themselves During Production
BMW Group project manager Sascha Andree explained: “Automated driving within the plant is fundamentally different from autonomous driving for customers. It doesn’t use sensors in the vehicle. In fact, the car itself is more or less blind and the sensors for maneuvering them are integrated along the route through the plant.”
Initially, the vehicles will only move through the assembly area and then to a parking area, ready for their onward journey by train or truck. But in reality, it is possible to use the tech as soon as the cars are capable of driving independently in the production process.
NavVis Digital Factory Solution is a key building block for the production of the future
NavVis, one of the world’s leading providers of reality capture and digital factory solutions, is capturing BMW Group’s worldwide plants and making the photorealistic panoramic images, floor plans, and point cloud data available to all the car manufacturer’s sites via its web-based platform, NavVis IVION Enterprise. The Munich-based mobile scanning specialist NavVis is supporting the BMW Group in the digitalization of its production network with its Digital Factory Solution.
BMW Creates Fully Automated Production Lines for 3D Printed Car Parts
By utilizing systems made up of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) platforms, combined with AI and robotics, that it has developed, the IDAM consortium can print 50,000 series parts a year, as well as 10,000 new and individual parts. Opened in 2020, BMW’s campus at Oberschleißheim has 50 3D printers for both metal and plastics. Aside from investing in a variety of 3D printing startups, including Desktop Metal and Xometry, the company also employs HP MultiJet Fusion (MJF) and EOS machines, among other brands.
Driving Toward A Sustainable Future
A physics-based electronics reliability assessment tool, Sherlock enables Schirmer and his team at BMW to assess the performance of PCBs under a range of thermal cycles, including temperature changes and static temperatures. BMW can also test PCB components for shock, random vibration, and steady mechanical loads.
Given the growing demand for new EV designs and product features, the Department of Power Electronics is under pressure to complete its reliability studies quickly — but without compromising analytic depth and breadth. “With Ansys Sherlock, I’m able to manage 90 to 95% of my analytic modeling with a single tool that integrates easily with Ansys Workbench, Ansys physics-based solvers, and ECAD tools,” says Schirmer. “I’m grateful to have a partner who understands my needs and responds to them with the right capabilities.”
actnano Inc. Announces Oversubscribed $21.75 Million Series B Funding
actnano, Inc., a global leader in surface protection technologies for automotive and consumer electronics, announced the close of an oversubscribed $21.75 million Series B financing led by BMW i Ventures. Additional new investors include HELLA Ventures and TDK Ventures. All Series A investors, including Emerald Technology Ventures, GC Ventures America, Henkel Tech Ventures, Ireon Ventures and Material Impact, also participated in the round.
actnano specializes in water and environmental resistant nanocoating technologies. The company’s innovative surface protection solutions are trusted by global automotive and consumer electronics OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers. actnano’s nanoGUARD technologies are currently protecting electronics on over 2 million production vehicles, including 80% of EVs in North America, as well as many of the world’s leading consumer devices. actnano will use the new funds to expand its global sales and technical teams, as well as ramp up production to meet the significant increase in demand for their product.
BMW uses Nvidia’s Omniverse to build state-of-the-art factories
BMW has standardized on a new technology unveiled by Nvidia, the Omniverse, to simulate every aspect of its manufacturing operations, in an effort to push the envelope on smart manufacturing. BMW has done this down to work order instructions for factory workers from 31 factories in its production network, reducing production planning time by 30%, the company said.
Product customizations dominate BMW’s product sales and production. They’re currently producing 2.5 million vehicles per year, and 99% of them are custom. BMW says that each production line can be quickly configured to produce any one of ten different cars, each with up to 100 options or more across ten models, giving customers up to 2,100 ways to configure a BMW. In addition, Nvidia Omniverse gives BMW the flexibility to reconfigure its factories quickly to accommodate new big model launches.
BMW succeeds with its product customization strategy because each system essential to production is synchronized on the Nvidia Omniverse platform. As a result, every step in customizing a given model reflects customer requirements and also be shared in real-time with each production team. In addition, BMW says real-time production monitoring data is used for benchmarking digital twin performance. With the digital twins of an entire factory, BMW engineers can quickly identify where and how each specific models’ production sequence can be improved. An example is how BMW uses digital humans and simulation to test new workflows for worker ergonomics and efficiency, training digital humans with data from real associates. They’re also doing the same with the robotics they have in place across plant floors today. Combining real-time production and process monitoring data with simulated results helps BMW’s engineers quickly identify areas for improvement, so quality, cost, and production efficiency goals keep getting achieved.
Expanding Omniverse: BMW Group Builds their Factory of the Future 2.0
Applying Artificial Intelligence to Paint Shop Robots
Häcker says that factories in the automotive industry have “enormous amounts of latent data about manufacturing processes, raw materials, and products. The key to leveraging these data assets is connectivity with the right interface at the control level to get at the information provided by robots, ovens, cathodic electrocoating systems or conveyor technology. Operators in existing plants are often constrained because most of their systems do not have connectivity and the right interface for data acquisition.”
Industry 4.0 and the Automotive Industry
“It takes about 30 hours to manufacture a vehicle. During that time, each car generates massive amounts of data,” points out Robert Engelhorn, director of the Munich plant. “With the help of artificial intelligence and smart data analytics, we can use this data to manage and analyze our production intelligently. AI is helping us to streamline our manufacturing even further and ensure premium quality for every customer. It also saves our employees from having to do monotonous, repetitive tasks.”
One part of the plant that is already seeing benefits from AI is the press shop, which turns more than 30,000 sheet metal blanks a day into body parts for vehicles. Each blank is given a laser code at the start of production so the body part can be clearly identified throughout the manufacturing process. This code is picked up by BMW’s iQ Press system, which records material and process parameters, such as the thickness of the metal and oil layer, and the temperature and speed of the presses. These parameters are related to the quality of the parts produced.
BMW-led study highlights need for AI-based AM part identification
With time-to-market in the automotive industry steadily decreasing, demand for prototyping components is higher than before and the vision of large-scale production, delivering just-in-time to assembly lines, is emerging. This is not only a question of increasing output quantity and production speed but also of economic viability. The process chain of current available AM technologies still includes a high amount of labor intensive work and process steps, which lead to a high proportion of personnel costs and decreased product throughput. Also, these operations lead to bottlenecks and downtimes in the overall process chain.
Fully automated end-of-line test bench for BMW eDrive
BMW Group and NVIDIA take virtual factory planning to the next level
The BMW Group and NVIDIA are generating a completely new approach to planning highly complex manufacturing systems – with the Omniverse platform. The virtual factory planning tool integrates a range of planning data and applications and allows real-time collaboration with unrestricted compatibility. As industry leaders, the BMW Group and NVIDIA are setting new standards in virtual factory planning.