The labor shortage is an ongoing concern in manufacturing, as the COVID-19 pandemic triggered employee moves across industries and put in place new guidelines for sick days and isolations at many manufacturing facilities. In short, it’s now more difficult to fill factory positions.

For decades, automation has been touted as the solution to labor shortages—to the point of workers fearing they would be replaced by robots. In reality, research has shown that the opposite is closer to the truth: when companies automate dull, dirty and dangerous tasks, they upskill those workers to tend the robots, or hire additional workers to support increased capacity triggered by the increased productivity of the robot. However, these trends take place over months and years, according to the equipment budgets and expertise of manufacturing companies. To address immediate labor shortages caused by the pandemic, solutions are needed immediately.

“When a machine shop owner struggles to find employees to do the work, their first instinct is to look for new CNC machines that can run unattended for longer and with shorter changeover times,” said Samuel Bouchard, CEO of Robotiq, in a press release. “But those machines are costly, and this, combined with a longer lead time, makes for a less than ideal solution.”

Bouchard’s company, Robotiq, specializes in these flexible automation challenges. The company manufactures collaborative end effectors, accessories and automation software.

What Are Collaborative Robots?

For readers not familiar with the term, collaborative robots, or “cobots,” are a subset of industrial robots that are designed to work safely with humans. This can include 6-axis arm robots, mobile robots, delta robots, or any robot that traditionally poses safety risks and other challenges that prevent humans from working in the area of the robot.

For example, a traditional arm robot is designed to move fast and accurately, with high torque to accurately move and position the payload through space. Many arm robots move at 2 m/s, or about 6.5 fps. Robots also have pinch points and sometimes wield dangerous end effectors such as sharp or hot tools. These robots are typically path programmed, meaning if an unexpected object enters the path of the arm, it will continue its motion and crash.

Because of these features of traditional robots, they are typically guarded by fences and cages or light curtains in a robotic cell, which human workers can’t enter without stopping the robot.

These robotic cells can be highly productive, but they don’t work well in applications where a human needs to frequently enter the work area, as this results in frequent process stoppages.

In contrast, a collaborative robot is designed with the goal of working alongside human workers, with no guarding and minimal stoppages. A true collaborative robot is designed to work easily with workers at every stage of its life, from deployment and programming, to running a program and performing motions alongside human workers, to being flexibly redeployed for another application.

There is a misconception that the collaborative robot segment is all about force sensing and safety. While it’s true that a cobot must have force sensing technology to avoid crashing into humans, safety is not the only difference between cobots and traditional robots. There’s also the important element of a user-friendly interface and programming design, as well as redeployment flexibility.

Cobots for Machine Tending

According to Robotiq, CNC machine tending is an ideal application for collaborative robots—such as in the case of a Universal Robots arm robot and Robotiq’s Machine Tending Solution. Engineering.com recently spoke with Ryan Weaver, vice president of commercial sales at Robotiq.

According to Weaver, machine shop and manufacturing facility leaders may not be interested in becoming robot programmers. Instead, a flexible solution that’s designed to do the same job in the same way that a human worker would is appealing.

“They don't want to learn how to deploy a cobot in extreme detail,” says Weaver. “They want all the pieces wrapped in a nice package and be able to deploy it directly, as opposed to having to figure it out for themselves.”

In automating a CNC machine, some noncollaborative solutions may require a software integration between the robot and the milling machine controller, as well as technical programming in the robot OEM’s proprietary language, along with building a guarded cell around the whole thing. With a cobot, Robotiq’s solution enables the customer to teach the robot the same process steps as the human worker, keeping the process simple and easy to understand.

“To design a machine tending solution, we’re talking to the machinist or the technical lead at a machine shop or at a manufacturer doing CNC machining,” says Weaver. Customers aren’t required to dig deep into the Universal Robots programming environment or integrations.

“For example, what does an operator do for a machining application? They watch the stack light to know when the machine is done its machining process. They push a button to start the machine. They step on a foot pedal to open or close the jaws in the lathe,” continues Weaver. With collaborative robots, customers can teach the robot to perform these same steps, making the software easy to program and troubleshoot.

Integrating Robotiq with the Universal Robots Programming Environment

Robotiq focuses almost exclusively on Universal Robots (UR) when designing its solutions. According to the company, this results in more focused solutions that make fewer compromises in order to be widely applicable.

“Many of our customers can’t see where UR’s software stops and where ours begins,” says Weaver. Robotiq’s tools are accessed using the UR teach pendant at the robot.

This tight partnership is part of the company’s philosophy of prioritizing ease of deployment. Five to 10 years ago, collaborative robot users built application solutions by procuring a robot, as well as integrating the tools, end effectors, sensors and fixtures needed. Today, Robotiq takes a holistic application-based approach, packaging the software and hardware needed to perform a specific application, such as machine tending or palletizing, and selling the application solution as a package.

According to Weaver, while the early adopters were happy to custom-integrate every application deployment, this new approach provides more value for most customers. “They’re a bunch of engineers and that tinkering is really exciting for them,” says Weaver. “But now those engineers are super busy. They’ve got more challenging projects to tackle and they want to involve other technical people in their team to deploy at a much larger scale. And you can’t do that by customizing every single deployment. So, we’ve looked at and said, We’re going to standardize on these tools that you can use and deploy that. And you’re going to be running a lot faster than if you built it all up yourself.”

Will Robots Take Jobs?

What happens to operators when robots begin machine tending? Contrary to the misconceptions, it simply doesn’t make sense to lay off a machine operator because the machine tending has been automated, especially when the robot was deployed to supplement a labor shortage. In most cases, those workers are retrained or upskilled to perform other work.

“In a lot of cases, workers tend to move to quality or inspection jobs, for example,” says Weaver.

The labor shortage isn’t just affecting low-skilled jobs such as machine operation and palletizing. Manufacturers need skilled workers across the factory, and automation of dangerous, dull or dirty tasks such as palletizing frees up hands to move to more value-added positions.

“Manufacturers are looking to hire in all kinds of areas. They would much rather take that good employee from the end of line and put them somewhere else. But they also still need someone to do the end-of-line palletizing. So, unless they can automate that, they can’t redeploy that person elsewhere,” says Weaver. “It’s really not about eliminating jobs. It’s really about, ‘let’s focus the people on the jobs that need the people.’ Because there’s a lot of those and still not enough people to fill them.”