Martin Caestecker

About Martin Caestecker

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April 30 2019

Robot27 Visits Automate in Chicago

Part of Robot27’s mission to provide the best service possible includes staying informed on the latest trends in automation. Visiting trade shows around the country is one of the best ways to do that. In April, Robot27 paid a visit to the Automate show in Chicago at McCormick Place – one of the industry’s largest gatherings of the year.

It was evident right from the start that Universal Robots continues to lead the collaborative robot industry. More than 85 UR cobots operated in the booths of more than 40 vendors during the show. From part handling and assembly to palletizing and packing, UR cobots showed their flexibility all across the floor.

UR’s dominant presence at Automate is greatly due to the success of the Universal Robots+ program. As a one-stop-showcase for UR-certified cobot accessories, UR+ takes the guesswork out of automation. One of the greatest frustrations for any manufacturer is ordering products that come with poor instructions. Many products take hours to set up and perhaps days or weeks to fine tune and get working. Others require calling a vendor technician or company representative to sort out the installation kinks. UR+ shows off products with easy-to-follow instructions and control interfaces integrated directly into UR cobots. Of the booths with UR cobots, 20 were developers of UR+ products and many, many more used UR+ products to perform tasks.

April 17 2019

UR Cobots Featured in Retooled Google Robotics Program

Since 2013, Google has been retooling its robotics program. The New York Times recently reviewed some of the new technology the tech conglomerate has been working on. Google’s researchers are currently focusing on machine learning – one of the hottest topics in collaborative robotics. The article notes that “machine learning – not extravagant new devices – will be the key to developing robotics for manufacturing, warehouse automation, transportation and many other tasks” in the coming years.

At Google’s new lab, two UR5 cobots were being used in their application called TossingBot. The first was equipped with an OnRobot 2-finger electric gripper and was using an overhead camera system and machine learning environment programmed by Google to pick random objects consisting of ping-pong balls, plastic bananas, wood blocks, and other items out of a bin and tossing them several feet across the room into a plastic box held by the other UR5. According to the article, it took about 14 hours of trial and error for the cobot with the gripper to learn from scratch how to locate and throw each of the random items into the plastic bin with 85 percent accuracy. When the program was first started, the cobots did not know how to throw any of the items in the bin. For comparison, researchers laden with the same task had about 80 percent accuracy.

This impressive marriage of physics, cobots, and a style of machine learning that google Google calls “deep learning” could shape the future for companies like Amazon and UPS. The Times notes that “humans sort through items that move in and out of distribution centers. A system like Google’s could automate at least part of the process…” which would certainly lead to faster order placement, faster product delivery, and lower costs for consumers.

Learn More About TossingBot in This Video from Google’s AI Blog

March 18 2019

Aluminum Extrusion Made Quick and Easy With Vention

If you’re tired of waiting week or months to have your aluminum extrusions or custom equipment delivered, Vention is the new company you need to know about. Thousands of miles of aluminum extrusion are in use every day in manufacturing spaces all over the country. Vention changes designing and delivering these solutions from a multiple-month ordeal into a few day success story.

Traditional aluminum extrusion suppliers have large lengths in stock which have to be cut down on the factory floor by your workers which is time consuming and tedious. When custom cut lengths can be ordered, these pieces can often have multi-week lead times. Design in a CAD/CAM program can take days due to tedious calculations and interface limitations. Vention changes all of this. With a warehouse full of pre-cut extrusion lengths, plus all of the fasteners, supports, and attachments you need, Vention is able to ship most designs within 24 hours of receiving an order. Their easy-to-use cloud-based design interface reduces design time to a fraction of traditional CAD/CAM modeling. Vention has really done their homework on assembly, too – many of its fasteners are optimized to limit the frustrations faced by workers with other extrusions on the market today. This revolutionary company is changing the way manufacturing views aluminum extrusion.

With a recently completed $17 Million capital investment campaign from Bain Capital, Vention has significantly expanded their product offerings. In addition to a host of new fasteners, extrusions, and interface improvements, Vention now offers actuators, motors, and logic controllers as part of their framework. This allows manufacturers to design custom equipment for their workspaces with short delivery times and easy assembly. Vention grew 600% last year and is expected to meet or exceed that growth again in 2019.

Robot27 utilizes Vention to provide sturdy, high-quality components for many of its automation cells. Vention’s speedy design and delivery windows help us deliver solutions faster than ever. They even have the entire Universal Robots product line integrated into their design interface which makes Vention the perfect compliment for your collaborative robots. If you have a project that requires a custom aluminum extrusion, Robot27 can provide the guidance you need to make sure your first Vention creation is a successful one.

Ready to learn more about Vention? Stay tuned… We are going to feature Vention in a future edition of our Waypoint newsletter. In the meantime, check out some of the cool designs featured by Vention in their product gallery:

Dual UR5 Workstation – Universal Robots

Overhead 7th axis for UR Cobot – Walt Industries, Inc.

Drilling Station for Automotive Applications

March 12 2019

How to Pick the Right Gripper for Your Cobot

Nearly every collaborative robot automation project requires the cobot to pick up or manipulate a part. In fact, there is an entire category of end-effectors we call grippers – those which attach to the cobot to allow it to pick up or grip onto some work piece or part. There are nearly as many grippers on the market as there are parts needing to be picked up. In this article, we aim to steer you towards picking out the right gripper for your next automation project.

Broadly, there are two ways that most grippers can be operated: via a source of compressed air or vacuum or mechanically through some electricity source. Deciding on the right gripper for your application depends largely on the parts you need to pick up and the resources already available in your work space.

Pneumatic grippers require some source of compressed air either to open and close the gripper’s jaws which grip the parts being handled or to create a vacuum which is used to pick up parts. Jaw-type pneumatic grippers are useful for picking up small- to medium-sized individual parts which need to be manipulated precisely – think about an assembly application where the cobot is used to place or install several components onto a work piece. Vacuum grippers are generally best for picking up larger object or in situations where more precise manipulation is not required.

Weiss Robotics Pneumatic Grippers

A good example would be picking up cardboard boxes or other flat, smooth objects to move them from a conveyor to a pallet or from one workspace to another. Vacuum grippers come in many flavors as well, with suction cups or foam-covered vacuum chambers being just two examples. For manufacturing spaces that already have compressed air on site, pneumatic grippers allow flexibility and strength while utilizing existing resources at your manufacturing space.

Robotiq’s 2-finger electric gripper feeding a CNC machine

Electric grippers are perfect for many part-handling applications. These grippers also come in many styles – from grippers with integrated force sensing so that a specific amount of force can be applied to the part being picked up to grippers with four or five “fingers” allowing parts to be picked up similarly to a human hand to electrically powered versions of the pneumatic jaw-type grippers – there is a wide variety to choose from. Many electric grippers available on the market today can be connected directly to the cobot for both control of the fingers and for the gripper’s source of power. Some have software components which make controlling them very simple with Universal Robots’ programming interface. Others require a simple 24 volt signal to open or close the jaws or fingers.

Selecting the right gripper is very important for any application. Robot27 provides the guidance you need to select the right one for your project. We can provide as much or as little help as you need – from complete engineering and programming of an entire collaborative work cell to consulting with your automation engineers to help them decide on the best hardware or the best design practices.

March 8 2019

Universal Robots at ATX West 2019

Every year in early February, the largest manufacturing expo in the West convenes at the Anaheim Convention Center for three action-packed days. With nearly 2,000 exhibitors and over 21,000 attendees, ATX West 2019 showcases the latest and the greatest in manufacturing and automation. Universal Robots cobots were at many booths throughout the Convention Center demonstrating various software and hardware products for a wide range of applications. Some of the most innovative applications were hosted at UR’s own booth at the show. In fact, UR’s booth secured the #2 spot on the Industrial Equipment News’ Top 5 Technologies List For ATX West 2019.

The first product featured in UR’s booth was a CNC interface designed for UR cobots by Versabuilt, a Certified Systems Integrator. Versabuilt’s demonstration showed how CNC machine tending could be achieved with an easy-to-program tool-changing and integrated CNC machine control with just a few selections from their software interface.

Next to Versabuilt at UR’s booth was Visumatic‘s automated screw driving application. With automatic fastener feeders, delivery confirmation, and support for multiple different screw-driving routines, Visumatic offered an elegant solution to automate repeatable fastener driving.

Also in UR’s booth was XPAK with a solution called ROBOX, a cardboard box assembling system. By entering the dimensions of the cardboard box into the cobot’s software interface, ROBOX would pick up a fresh, unassembled box from the supply pile, fold it, and tape it together all in just a few seconds. After passing through ROBOX, boxes were ready to be filled with myriad finished goods.

In total, more than 13 different booths at the show had a Universal Robots cobot in their display. Each showed off UR’s ease of programming and safety operating around literally thousands of spectators.

Featured Image modified from its original format: Tuxyso / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Robots-working-in-collaboration-with-workers-at-MANN+HUMMEL

January 29 2019

Getting Started With Cobots

Collaborative robots bring efficient and cost effective automation to small- and medium-sized manufacturers. More commonly known as cobots, these machines work right alongside your existing workforce – assisting with repetitive or potentially harmful tasks instead of replacing valuable workers. Many manufacturers see automation as a great way to increase productivity and bottom lines, but are unsure where to get started or where to go from the automation they already have. Cobots offer the best solution to this common problem.

Deciding what tasks can be automated with cobots is an important first step. Though this might seem like a simple issue, there are a few things you should consider before installing your first cobot:

Cobots are best suited for tasks that your workers can perform by hand. Most mid-sized cobots have about the same reach and lifting capacity as the average worker. Cobots come in a few different sizes and payload capacities to suit your automation needs.
Cobots operate at similar speeds to humans. The gains in productivity predominantly come from the reduction in the amount of time taken between tasks and the increase in time that a cobot is available for work. In many cases, cobots can work around the clock with little to no assistance from a human operator. Of course, there is some variation from task to task.
Cobots are ideal for repetitive, manual tasks. While cobots have a large amount of tech onboard, tasks that require critical thinking or analysis, extremely fine dexterity, or problem solving skills are not well suited for automation. There are technologies that allow cobots to perform more advanced inspection or material handling. Once you have a few automation projects under your belt, these kind of projects might be more your speed.

Once you have decided what you can automate, the next important decision to make is the location of your cobot’s workspace. Cobots are designed to be inherently safe – that is to say that cobots have built in safeguards and safety systems to prevent them from damaging the parts they work with or harming people working around the cobot. These safety systems can be further fortified by connecting additional safety sensors to the cobot. These safeguards allow most cobots to be deployed without a safety cage or complex guarding often associated with traditional large-scale automation. No guarding means a smaller workspace footprint – these machines are not going to take up a large amount of valuable space on your manufacturing floor.

The next task to tackle is actually telling the cobot what to do. Programming the cobot might seem to be a daunting task for some manufacturers. The truth is that with a very small amount of training, most factory workers can be trained how to operate and program a cobot in just a few hours. This ease of programming not only allows you to quickly automate tasks, but also makes it easy to redeploy the cobot at various places around your manufacturing floor. Unlike traditional robots, cobots are so easy to program that they can be useful to automate even short run manufacturing projects. Part of the programming process is figuring out what needs to be attached to the end of the cobot arm to allow the cobot to do its work. There are a wide variety of the type of end-of-arm tooling we call “grippers” on the market today. These grippers can be powered by compressed air, vacuum, or electricity and can be used to pick up, move, twist, or otherwise manipulate parts. Many manufacturers use 3D printers to make “fingers” for their grippers or custom attachments for their cobots that perfectly suit the task at hand. However, many of the grippers available on the market today can be used right out of the box to pick up and manipulate items.

Cobots can be set up to easily communicate with your other machinery, too. From mimicking simple human actions like pressing the start button on a CNC machine to more complex tasks like advancing a conveyor belt to bring parts down an assembly line, the onboard signal and information-processing systems are flexible yet powerful. This connectivity is important since cobots will likely be working alongside at least one other piece of equipment.

Have questions about installing a cobot at your business? Robot27 can help. From designing fully engineered automation systems to providing the training you and your staff need to successfully set up a cobot on your own, Robot27 specializes in providing the assistance you need. We work with manufacturers small and large to make sure that their cobot automation projects are a success. For more information, please reach out to us on the Contact Us page on our website.

January 21 2019

Robot27 Attends ATX West 2018

Robot 27 was invited to be part of Universal Robots’ booth at ATX West 2018 held at the Anaheim Convention Center. At the conference, we displayed a demo of an automated welding solution which includes a custom-programmed URCap to supplement ARC Specialties’ new SnapWeld system. This program is designed to weld gussets into structural steel members with minimal input from the cobot operator. The demonstration garnered much attention including an interview by Lisa Eitel, Senior Editor of Design World Magazine.

Over the last several months, Robot27 has worked on several customized URCaps for various software- and hardware-based products. One which is still under review for inclusion into the Universal Robots Plus was designed for American Hakko. The company approached Robot27 to develop an easy-to-use interface for their soldering end effector designed to be used with UR robots. Robot27 turned a clunky, difficult-to-learn interface with a more simple, easy-to-operate version designed to integrate seamlessly with UR’s programming interface. Look for this program on UR Plus later in 2019.

Interested in learning more? Come visit us at the 2019 ATX West show on February 8, 2019. Advanced registration for this event is free. Please contact us for details.

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January 21 2019

Studies Find Labor Demands Increase In Tandem With Automation

As automation becomes more accessible to small- to medium-sized manufacturers, managers may wonder: “what will happen to my existing labor force when we automate?” Analysis of an in-depth study by the Mannheim Centre for European Economic Research shows that labor demands grew as the amount of automation in local businesses increased. Data was collected in over two hundred regions across twenty-seven EU countries to provide a better picture of technological change since the year 2000. Though the study notes that some jobs were inevitably displaced, the increase in productivity resulting from automation significantly outpaced the technological change alone. This increase in productivity resulted in the addition of more jobs to handle the increased product output.

The Mannheim Centre is not the only group studying this trend. The Swiss-run World Economic Forum notes in its “The Future of Jobs Report 2018” that robots “will displace 75 million jobs globally by 2022, but create 133 million new ones” according to an article by the BBC. The WEF also sites the efficiency of computer and robotic algorithms significantly boosting productivity of existing jobs. As some manufacturing jobs are replaced, new demands for data analysts, software engineers, and quality control specialists will be needed to fully harness the changing nature of work. The WEF also notes that increased automation will most certainly lead to existing workers being retrained for new roles.

Robot27 works with businesses of all sizes to help automate their production lines. We provide the guidance you need to properly retrain your workforce to augment the implementation of new collaborative robots in your work environment. We have found that most workers can be quickly retrained to work right along side of a cobot – exchanging parts or tasks with the cobot throughout the workday. These safe and reliable machines can help your business achieve the productivity and profitability gains you need without eliminating valuable workers.

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Jürgen von Hollen President Universal Robots

January 8 2019

Universal Robots Leverages Former Competitor Rethink Robotics

Since its inception in 2005, Universal Robots has continually pioneered advances in collaborative robotics. As the global leader in a market expected to reach $600 million in 2019 and $7.9 billion by 2027 according to Interact Analysis, UR is always looking for a way to keep its nearly 50 percent market share in new and innovative ways.

Earlier this month, the Boston Globe reported that UR hired nearly two dozen employees from its former competitor Rethink Robotics of Boston, Mass. which is currently reorganizing under Germany\’s Hahn Group after shutting its doors suddenly last year. UR President and CEO Jürgen von Hollen had \”nothing but nice things to say\” about his former competitor Rethink, stating that they were \”One of the best competitors [UR] ever had\” which pushed UR to continually improve its products. Robotics.org notes that the acquisition of some of Rethink\’s top minds \”will help expedite UR\’s strategic ambitions and actions\” over the coming years – especially with their knowledge of the cobot market and the needs of its customers. Rethink\’s two collaborative robot systems, released in 2012 and 2015 respectively, were somewhat doomed to fail due to the cobots\’ reliance on an imprecise spring-actuated motion control method. Despite this limitation, Rethink\’s cobots sporting multiple-axis control, embedded and external vision, and built-in force sensing made a sizable dent in the cobot market.

While the Globe reports that the cobot market had \”plenty of room for UR and Rethink to coexist\”, it is hard to say for sure what the future may bring. More and more companies are entering the cobot market – from lower-cost UR copies from Asia to many of the traditional robotics companies like Kuka, Fanuc and ABB. The traditional robotics companies certainly have the pedigree and the talent to saturate the cobot market with new products. However, only time will tell how well these new market entrants will stack up against UR\’s well-established cobot brand. It is obvious that cobots will be the automation segment to watch over the next decade.

Despite the increase in competition, UR continues to innovate to keep its edge in the global market. UR\’s new e-Series cobots feature a redesigned programming interface and a host of new features and upgrades making them easier to program, redeploy, and operate than ever. You can read more about the e-Series in a previous blog post. Robot27 deploys UR cobots – which boast some of the fastest returns on investment in the robotics world – in most of its automation solutions.

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June 30 2018

Universal Robots Launches Revolutionary e-Series Cobots

On June 23, 2018, Universal Robots launched the new e-Series family of cobots at the Automatica trade show in Munich – the world’s most comprehensive trade show dedicated to automation. Along with UR’s staple features of rapid deployment, easy programming and setup, and high-tech safety protections, the new e-Series also includes a host of great new features. Integrated force-torque sensors, enhanced and redesigned teach pendant (UR’s programming interface) complete with lighter and easier-to-use cabling and touch controls, and additional input and control ports are just a few of e-Series’ benefits. You can read more about the benefits of e-Series on UR’s website. The Robot27 team has already completed several projects with e-Series cobots and have found them to be a fantastic new piece of machinery.