5 Operations You Can Easily Automate With Collaborative Robots in Your Factory
As a factory owner, you’re probably looking to solve as many business problems as possible. From labor shortage to increasing productivity, more and more solutions can help you fix those issues. For example, one of the latest trends in manufacturing is the application of collaborative robots.
These robots are flexible, easy to use, and can be used for a variety of tasks. Collaborative robots or cobots are expanding quickly, and it’s expected the market to triple itself in just five years. Do you want to know which tasks you can automate with cobots?
Olympus Controls has helped many companies like yours to automate a variety of applications.
Here are some of the applications that you can automate with collaborative robots:
Palletizing
If you’ve been looking at “palletizing automation” online, you might have seen those high-volume production solutions. However, nowadays, the use of collaborative robots for palletizing is becoming more and more common.
The first significant benefit you get from cobot palletizing solutions is flexibility. They are smaller than the usual robotic palletizers and are easy to reprogram or redeploy. This makes them also more accessible to smaller volume productions.
The Robotiq Palletizing Solution is an excellent example of a more accessible all-in-one solution for manufacturers. It includes a Universal Robot with a vacuum gripper and a seventh vertical axis to palletize many different pallet sizes and configurations.
Here is a demo of how it works:
We can help you to select the most profitable application to automate. Schedule a free visit with one of our automation engineers.
3D Bin Picking
Bin picking has always been a difficult task to automate. There was always a considerable margin of error, and robots couldn’t fulfill the tasks.
But today, we are seeing various 3D bin picking solutions coming on the market. They are also becoming easier to use and accessible due to new technologies combined with collaborative robots. It is now possible to use a cobot like Universal Robots to pick random items found in a bin and place them for the next task. These solutions use 3D vision to locate the parts in the bin, identify them, and pick them up.
Automated bin picking will help you save time rearranging parts to be processed by a robot and speed up your operations.
Source: Universal Robots
Solutions like the Universal Robots ActiNav require no vision or robotic programming expertise. Users actually move the robot with their own hands to program it. ActiNav combines real-time autonomous motion control, collaborative robotics, vision, and sensor systems in one easy-to-use, fast-to-deploy, and cost-effective kit.
Welding
As you might know, there is a severe lack of welders in the United States. Companies still need to increase their productivity and reduce their costs to stay competitive. This is why robotic welding can help. However, not all robotic welding solutions are a good fit for manufacturers, especially small and medium ones.
This is why using collaborative robots to weld becomes beneficial. We see new welding solutions using collaborative coming on the market. Usually, with an easy-to-program interface, those solutions are more flexible and accessible to SMEs.
Olympus Controls is offering the Melton Machine Cobot Welder. It comes with its own “Let’s Weld Together” programming interface created by Melton Machine. Users can access it through the teach pendant of the UR cobot. This welder can work on both thick and thin parts with various welding options and programming capabilities.
Adhesive/Dispensing
Dispensing is another application where it’s crucial to be accurate and consistent. Whether to increase productivity and reducing waste, dispensing is a great fit for automation. This is why Universal Robots can give your line a higher accuracy level beyond human capabilities.
Collaborative robots’ size and programming interface make them flexible to be used in production lines with little space. Robot27 Dispensing solution, as an example, comes with three different models designed for all kinds of dispensing processes. They are all equipped with a Robot27 programming interface that makes management and setting up these cobots easy.
Robotic Screwdriving
Robotic screwdriving is another great application to automate. Cobots have introduced many benefits for these kinds of operations: improved consistency, reduced injuries, better flexibility, etc. As you already know, programming a cobot doesn’t need extensive robotics knowledge. In other words, automating a screwdriving operation with a collaborative robot is a flexible and accessible solution.
This type of automation guarantees consistency. Robots don’t make mistakes and don’t get bored with the repetitiveness of the task at hand.
Take this case study at Darex, based in Oregon, where a Universal Robot was deployed for screwdriving.
How to Get Started?
Before you start implementing collaborative robots into your operations, make sure to assess your needs. See what kind of robots would be the best fit, how you can organize your assembly lines, and where your bottlenecks will be.
You can also reach out to our automation engineers to help you find and design the best collaborative robot application in your factory!
At Olympus Controls, we specialize in robotic technologies and offer innovative machine automation solutions. We can help you develop a robust solution to expedite your automation project from concept to completion.
