About AkzoNobel Wood Wood Coatings Lab
At its wood coatings laboratory in Hilden, Germany, AkzoNobel develops, tests, and validates advanced wood coating solutions for industrial customers.
In this environment, precision is critical. The lab supports:
Product development
Validation and benchmarking
Quality management
Customer-specific performance testing
Here, consistent paint application is not just important - it is essential for generating reliable, repeatable test results.
The Challenge: Ensuring Absolute Consistency in Manual Test Application
In laboratory environments, paint is traditionally applied manually by skilled technicians.
However, even highly experienced operators introduce natural variation:
Differences in spray angle
Distance to the surface
Speed of movement
Overlap patterns
For a development lab focused on validation and quality management, this creates a key challenge:
How do you ensure identical paint applications across tests, operators, and time?
Additionally:
Frequent changes between coatings and substrates are required
Programming traditional robots for each test setup would be slow and impractical
Skilled lab staff should focus on evaluation - not robot programming
The Hilden team needed a flexible, no-code automation solution that could replicate expert spray movements with extreme precision.
The Solution: Mimic Installation with High-Precision Tracking
To solve this, AkzoNobel implemented a Mimic-powered painting station in Hilden.
The installation includes:
A Universal Robots cobot, UR10e
Nordbo’s Mimic software
High-precision trackers (ensuring extremely accurate motion capture)
Nordbo’s pedestal with integrated slider
The pedestal and slider provide two critical advantages:
Extended reach of the cobot
More space and ergonomic freedom for the operator
With Mimic, operators simply demonstrate the desired spray pattern. The high-precision trackers capture even subtle wrist movements, angles, and speed variations.
Within seconds, the robot can reproduce the exact same motion - consistently and repeatedly.
Because this is a permanent lab installation, the system is now integrated into daily validation and development workflows.
What Makes the Hilden Setup Unique?
Compared to earlier installations, the Hilden system leverages:
High-accuracy tracking technology for extremely fine motion reproduction
A fixed, fully integrated lab station
A workflow tailored for coating validation rather than production
This allows the lab to:
Standardize paint application methods
Lock in “best practice” spray movements
Eliminate operator-to-operator variation
Ensure comparable results across development cycles
The Results
The impact for the Hilden lab has been significant:
✅ Highly consistent and repeatable paint application for validation work
✅ Reliable quality benchmarking independent of operator variation
✅ Fast changeovers between different coatings and test scenarios
✅ No coding required — operators teach the robot directly
✅ Improved confidence in development data and quality management processes
Most importantly, the lab can now separate two critical elements:
Human expertise defines the correct spray pattern
Robotic precision ensures it is executed identically every time
Human Expertise Secured Through Robotics
In coating development, the smallest variation can influence test results.
With Mimic, AkzoNobel’s Hilden lab has created a system where:
Technicians demonstrate the ideal application once
The robot repeats it perfectly - every time
Quality reflects defined best practice, not daily variation
The result is a powerful combination of:
- Human know-how
- High-precision motion capture
- Robotic repeatability
With Mimic, automated spray application becomes not just possible - but a reliable foundation for advanced wood coating development and validation.