A Third Hand on the Production Line – Collaboration Robots

How is this safe? With col­lab­o­ra­tion robots, as soon as some­thing approach­es and enters the robot’s zone, it slows its motion down sig­nif­i­cant­ly. If the robot and a human work­er are inter­act­ing for a task like assem­bly, and the human attempts to inter­act with the robot while it is in motion, this is a vio­la­tion of the robot’s safe­ty sen­sors. The robot will stop auto­mat­i­cal­ly. This keeps the human safe dur­ing inter­ac­tion, and if they enter the robot’s zone dur­ing operation.

One com­pa­ny bring­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion robot­ics to the fore­front is Uni­ver­sal Robots. They have devel­oped an entire line of robots that are easy to use, easy to pro­gram, have no pinch points, and are safe for humans to inter­act with for many dif­fer­ent tasks. By design­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion robots of this cal­iber, com­pa­nies like Uni­ver­sal Robots are able to stream­line indus­tri­al automa­tion for their cus­tomers, giv­ing them a third, or even fourth, hand on the pro­duc­tion line dur­ing tasks.

How is a third hand help­ful? Accord­ing to Kei­th Wan­ner, Pres­i­dent of Robots​.com, it is dif­fi­cult to auto­mate a line 100 per­cent because of costs, tech­nol­o­gy lim­its, non-pre­cise parts, ran­dom runs, etc. ​“It’s bet­ter for humans to do some of the oper­a­tions,” Wan­ner stated.

One exam­ple of this would be food pack­ag­ing. Think of it this way — If you are work­ing on a veg­etable or fruit pro­cess­ing line, a robot may be able to pick up a piece of pro­duce and put it in the cor­rect box or con­tain­er, but the robot lacks the sens­es to see if the pro­duce is good or bad. With a human work­ing along­side the robot, the human can use their sens­es to inspect the food. Then, the robot can pack­age the food, and anoth­er human down the line can inspect the pack­ag­ing. By work­ing hand in hand this way, the work gets done in a more effi­cient, stream­lined man­ner, while dodg­ing the cost of automat­ing the entire line – some­thing that may be com­plete­ly unfea­si­ble for the company.

With com­pa­nies find­ing more and more ways to use col­lab­o­ra­tion in their robot lines, clients are going to be able to auto­mate their pro­duc­tion in new and excit­ing ways – safe­ly lend­ing a hand and stream­lin­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for their factories.

If inter­est­ed in any of these, con­tact Robots​.com online or give them a call today at 877−762−6881.