High-Accuracy Car Body Sealing with Multi-Robot 3D Vision

01 Story

Pickit developed a car body sealing localization solution in close collaboration with automotive OEM R&D teams that were struggling with the limitations of mechanical fixtures for positioning large vehicle bodies. They identified a critical market gap for a robust, reliable, and easy-to-deploy solution for car body positioning.

The goal was to create a robust and easily deployable system capable of handling multiple car models on the same production line while maintaining the accuracy required for a critical quality process.

Although first deployed in automotive, the concept targets any industry processing large parts where fixed tooling reduces flexibility and increases cost.

02 Challenges

The application combines multiple layers of complexity:

• Multi-robot, multi-camera coordination where several detections must be merged to reach the required accuracy and cycle time.

• Extreme orientation accuracy on large parts—even a small angular error propagates over long distances and leads to defective sealing.

• Robot-mounted vision in confined spaces, sometimes inside the car body, requiring a compact and lightweight sensor.

• High-mix production, with different vehicle models on the same line.

• True 24/7 stability, because a single minute of downtime in automotive production costs tens of thousands of euros, making frequent recalibration unacceptable.

This combination meant that both accuracy and a form factor robot-mounted camera were non-negotiable.

03 Solution

Pickit built a flexible, globally deployable product centered on its 3D vision platform and powered by Zivid 2+ MR60 robot-mounted cameras. The features that stood out:

• Compact and high-accuracy 3D cameras allowing full robot mobility and localization of multiple car body elements (body, doors, trunk).

• Stable calibration over time, maintaining accuracy for months despite temperature changes, vibrations, and varying light conditions.

• Seamless software integration, the result of a long-term collaboration and tight integration between Pickit and the Zivid SDK.

• Global support structure, enabling optimization and deployment across Europe, Asia, and the US.

• Intuitive deployment workflow, allowing partners to install the system and hand it over to factory maintenance teams with minimal effort.

The result is a standard product that can be replicated worldwide rather than a one-off custom project. In industrial automation, a solution that works once in a controlled setup has limited value; what truly matters is consistent performance in real production and the ability to scale across lines, plants, and continents. By transforming a complex integration into a repeatable and reliable deployment model, Pickit enables manufacturers to roll out the same proven process globally with confidence.

04 Results

By combining Pickit and Zivid, the application delivers the level of consistency required for continuous production while avoiding frequent recalibration and unplanned downtime. In an environment where every minute of line stoppage represents a significant financial loss, this long-term stability is essential.

The ease of deployment and intuitive maintenance workflow allow system integrators to roll out the solution efficiently and hand it over smoothly to plant teams, reducing total cost of ownership and accelerating adoption. As a result, the system is not treated as a custom project but as a repeatable product, with further global rollouts already underway and additional performance improvements planned.

The car body localization solution has moved beyond a single deployment and is now standardized across multiple factories on different continents, demonstrating that it can be replicated reliably at global scale. This industrialization proves not only the technical performance of the system but also the confidence end customers have in its robustness for a mission-critical automotive process.