Making the Transition from Manual to Robotic Assembly

There is noth­ing quite like watch­ing an assem­bly robot work­ing on a line. The tire­less reli­a­bil­i­ty and effi­cien­cy of the robot­ic assem­bly arm is a sight to behold. How­ev­er, these amaz­ing sys­tems don’t just pop into exis­tence. They are not born – they are made.

An assem­bly robot is brought into the world the same way as all oth­er robot arms – design, fab­ri­ca­tion and assem­bly. Engi­neers build the robot from base to wrist, and then con­nect every­thing to the controller.

How­ev­er, it is the tran­si­tion­ing a facil­i­ty from man­u­al to robot­ic assem­bly that can lead a man­u­fac­tur­er to prob­lems and headaches down the road if not done correctly.

The first thing a man­u­fac­tur­er needs to do is fig­ure out what each human work­er is doing on the line dur­ing the assem­bly process, as well as what they do with the parts they assem­ble. Then, while work­ing with engi­neers, the man­u­fac­tur­er needs to fig­ure out how to trans­late that into how a robot would han­dle the parts. Robot assem­blers tend to have dif­fer­ent tol­er­ances than human hands, and also han­dle parts in a dif­fer­ent nature than a human work­er, hence the need for the trans­la­tion process.

Engi­neers will fig­ure out the range of part vari­ables, which will allow the robot to deci­pher the dif­fer­ence between an accept­able and unac­cept­able part. The man­u­fac­tur­er and engi­neers may have to take a look at their end prod­uct and fig­ure out if they have to redesign and rework the way the item is assem­bled before robot­ic assem­blers can take over the process.

Final­ly, man­u­fac­tur­ers need to fig­ure out what end-of-arm-tool­ing works best for their parts. Dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als require dif­fer­ent types of end-of-arm-tooling.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor for robot mod­els from Fanuc, Motoman ABB, Uni­ver­sal Robots, and KUKA robot­ics, as well as oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers, works with cus­tomers to cus­tomize assem­bly robots to fit their facility’s automa­tion needs. Robots​.com’ high­ly trained staff can work with you to fig­ure out the right robot­ic assem­bly sys­tem for your pro­duc­tion line.

For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact Robots​.com today at 877−762−6881.