Tyres are bulky and awkward to handle. All tyres go through a 100% inspection process before dispatch. Two wheeler tyres have to be tested for both imbalance and trueness (runout/phaseout). Typically an operator handles around 800 tyres per shift putting them through imbalance and trueness testing machines. Considering an average weight of 4 kg per tyre and 3 picks and places to process each tyre, the cumulative weight handled is around 10 tonnes/day. This repeated handling results is a lot of fatigue for the operators. There are severe productivity losses towards the end of each shift.

Robots are ideally suited for this application. The tyres are fed from the previous manual inspection stations on an infeed conveyor and the robots take care of the rest. The tyres are fed to the imbalance machines and then the trueness testing machines.The tyres that pass the tests are marked and sent to the next process on an outfeed conveyor. The rejected tyres are separated based on the type of rejection and a printer is used to print the reject data on the tyres. These tyres can then be reworked or scrapped based on the type of defects.