Manufacturer of collaborative robots (cobots) Universal Robots is demonstrating both welding and machine tending applications at this year’s Robotics and Automation exhibition.
As visitors to the Coventry Building Society are discovering, the cobot’s welding capabilities have been put to use by Carriere Industrial Supply (CIS), a Canadian manufacturer of mining equipment.
Plasma-cutting cobots developed by Universal Robots allowed CIS to work on production of its difficult-to-manoeuvre equipment by bringing the robot to the project rather than the reverse. It is estimated that implementation of such cobots saved 1,000 hours on a single project.
For machine tending, automotive component manufacturer Contintental acquired several of the company’s UR10 cobots to automate the manufacture and handling of PCB boards in one of its Spanish facilities. It’s claimed that automating this process in such a way reduced changeover time in half, from 40 minutes to 20 minutes.
Other applications include quality inspection, dispensing, and material handling. Universal Robots’ products can be found in the supply chains of consumer brands like L’Oreal and Unilever, as well as car manufacturers Ford and Nissan.
Robert Gorman, Universal Robots’ segment manager of machine tending for the UK and Ireland, said the company has seen a “diverse” range of visitors at the show interested in different applications of the machines.
He noted that potential customers have included visitors enquiring about using the robots for “machine tending, packaging [and] pick-and-place” applications.
