Tongchuan

After the tour they took us to a conference room to see their hype video and gave us some fresh fruit. They have very large and nice office too. We then went down to the show room and saw some of the different finished actuators.

China, day 4.5 We toured an actuator factory at @tcdrive2012. The manufacturing line was almost like a clean room, we had to put on factory scrubs, our shoes were shrink wrapped in a special machine and then we passed thru a chamber where the air was blown out and replaced with new air to prevent contamination. Their manufacturing process is proprietary so we weren’t allowed to film everywhere. They took us thru each station in the assembly line and explained what they are doing. I was surprised at the workers slow speed, they seemed more concerned with producing a quality product than doing it fast. About a third of the factory/stations were dedicated to various communication, precision, noise and others quality controls. I was allowed to film in the testing room were they had built a custom rig to measure the accuracy while moving weights around. Notice how each actuator and arm sits on a MASSIVE inch thick pipe and plate stand. Extremely thick metal like this is used in high precision applications(for example, CNC machines) to prevent any flex. This lets their test stand have extreme high sensitivity/precision. They didn’t even call it out, but I was very impressed with their attention to detail. They had more rooms for R&D. They let us photo some arms and humanoids they built for marketing. One customer had a humanoid partially assembled in the factory that I wasn’t allowed to photograph.