Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) recently released a case study from its customer Magna-Power, a manufacturer of programmable power products for industrial and research applications.
Magna-Power products are made to order, with the company aiming for the shortest lead-times in the industry to stay competitive in global markets. To meet demand with fast turnaround, Magna-Power adopted the MiR100 to help employees on the manufacturing floor become more efficient.
Employees previously spent hours moving materials from one department to another; backlogs at the stockroom window were common. Sometimes parts were missing or weren’t ready at the time of kitting, which required an employee to later hand-deliver one or two parts at a time.
The MiR100 was used to automate material transportation so employees can focus on more important, high-level activities.
Stockroom employees kit and load bins on the robot’s top module shelving as it moves through each of the programmed checkpoints, where employees can pause it to unload kits and load finished assemblies for transport back to inventory. Once the robot returns to the stockroom, it automatically connects to its charging station while being reloaded.
Eventually Magna-Power add a second robot. They have been programmed to run designed paths, called “bus routes”, throughout the facility, from the stockroom to each manufacturing operation.
“MiR’s user-friendly, web-based interface and its drag-and-drop programming allowed us to get the robots up and running – literally within minutes,” said Grant Pitel, Magna-Power’s VP of engineering. “We expect the robots to pay for themselves within a year, freeing the equivalent of three employees from low-value work, so it was an easy business decision to make.”
Instead of having to build tracks on the floor for the robots to get from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’, the MiR100 navigates safely around obstacles in a dynamic environment using installed maps and mission outlines.
“I wrote a custom Python script that interacts with the MiR robots via the REST API,” Pitel said.
“The script is called at certain times of day, five days a week, using Window Task Scheduler. We stagger the deployment so that the robots don’t try to park in the same destinations at the same time, but if they do, they will skip that waypoint and move on to the next. A PLC with two toggle switches was also added to allow shop floor employees to pase the mission and force the robot to return to the stockroom, if necessary.”
On average, the MiR100s drive 4.6 miles per day carrying up to 220 pounds.
Pitel explained that challenges with the MiR100 robots were met in training employees not to walk to the stockroom for materials anymore and to instead use the robots. This resulted in a culture change at the facility, among other things.
“Automating material flow also exposed a deficiency in our inventory system,” Pitel explained. “Employees started taking finished goods from the robots before the stockroom had a chance to receive them. Departments started taking the wrong kits and jobs were getting lost. Because of the robots, we have started implementing a better material-tracking system.”
MiR installed 200 mobile autonomous robots around the world in 2016, in environments ranging from mid-sized, regional organizations to large global manufacturers.
To learn more about the MiR100, visit the Mobile Industrial Robots website.