Despite their initial concerns about the cost of automation technology, one company deployed a collaborative robot with great success: Tennplasco Inc., a small plastic fabrication company based in Lafayette, Tennessee.
Like many manufacturers, Tennplasco was dealing with difficulties hiring skilled workers. According to a recent report from Barclays, there will be 200 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2020. Deloitte Consulting expects that number to climb closer to 3.5 million by 2025.
Danny Rose, General Manager at Tennplasco, said, “We have been really struggling to get workers in our factory, especially on the off shifts. The truth is, there are not a lot of people in our area looking for injection molding jobs, and if we don’t have people showing up to work, we can’t operate.”
Rose knew that automation could be the solution to his staffing problems. However, small and medium enterprises like Tennplasco are often reluctant to invest in expensive technology.
Nevertheless, Tennplasco was struggling to meet the needs of their customers. The CFO gave the green light to implement Rethink Robotics Sawyer, a precision collaborative robot designed for machine tending, line loading and unloading, and other repetitive factory and fabrication tasks.
At Tennplasco, the robot was trained to perform visual part inspections and to load and tend a welding machine on the assembly line. The robot works closely with human employees, and can interact directly with workers without fences or safety monitored stopping.
Training is easy, thanks to hand guiding. This feature is common to many cobots, and means users can simply grab the “wrist” of the robot and guide it through a sequence of motions.
Check out this video of a KUKA robot demonstration of hand guiding to see an example of this training method.
End effector technology allows the robot to sense applied forces, recording the three-dimensional path. Hand guiding avoids tedious and expensive x,y,z coordinate programming, and a simple pick-and-place operation can be up and running in a matter of minutes.
With Rethink’s devices, the arm can be put in “zero-G mode,” in which the motors work to compensate for the robot’s own weight, while the torque sensors allow the human trainer to move the arm freely. This allows the Sawyer to be taught easily using hand guiding.
Sawyer’s small footprint and precise movement makes it ideal for operating a machine designed for humans. In this video, you can see Sawyer hit a button to start a machine.
“We don’t have to worry about whether the shift will be staffed, and we can stop wasting our time and effort on trying to recruit nonexistent labor,” said Rose. “Our customers, especially those in the automotive industry, trust us to support their businesses and meet their changing needs, but to do this, we need both workers and the technology to be innovative and nimble – Sawyer has made that possible.”
Tennplasco operates their cobot 24 hours a day, five days a week. Their deployment of collaborative robotics technology was a huge success, meeting return on investment within three months, and allowing them to reassign employees to more interesting, less repetitive tasks. Building on this success, Rose and his team plans to implement collaborative robots in various other injection molding tasks soon.
The Rethink Robotics Sawyer is one of a growing segment of collaborative robot arms:
· The Comau AURA is a much larger example, featuring a pressure- and proximity-sensitive skin and a 110kg payload.
· ENGINEERING.com got an up-close-and-personal look at the Staubli TX2 robot in this video.
· The KUKA KMR iiwa is able to move autonomously, thanks to integrated laser scanners and control software.
Interested in learning more about collaborative robots? Check out A History of Collaborative Robots: From Intelligent Lift Assists to Cobots.