ABB at Tata Motors

What it is

Three months at ABB India, working on the plant floor at Nelamangala on automotive assembly line design and on spot-welding robot routines for the Tata Sierra EV, plus maintenance on the industrial robot fleet running there.

The problem and the constraint

Everything I had built before this was a one-off. A prototype has to work once, in front of me, on a good day. A spot-welding cell has to work every cycle, for years, with somebody else’s hands on it and somebody else’s parts going through it, and it has to do so while a plant manager is measuring the cost of every second it does not.

That is a different definition of “works”, and it is the reason this internship mattered more than its length suggests. On the floor, the constraints that dominate are not the ones a student optimises for. Reach and singularity avoidance, tooling clearance, cable management, access for the maintenance technician who has to get to the thing at 2 a.m. — these decide a cell layout long before anything elegant does.

What I did

Designed assembly lines. Programmed robot routines for spot-welding car bodies. Maintained the fleet on the floor, which is where most of the learning was: you find out what a robot design is actually like by being the person who has to service it.

There is no “what went wrong” section on this page, and that is the honest description of the internship rather than an omission. I was given work and I did it. The value was not autonomy, it was proximity — three months of standing next to production equipment that has to earn its keep.