UNIVERSAL ROBOTS URe/UR Series Use-Cases

Our goal is to get reliable product lines where we can produce efficiently and effectively while keeping our staffing costs down. As a food producer, it is extremely important for us to minimize downtime, so we can supply fresh goods at a competitive price.

This process has now been optimized with collaborative robot arms UR10 and UR5. Implementation time 2 weeks.

The cobots enable each production line to prepare on average 228 items per hour for delivery. The payback period on the robots is just one year.

Flywheel’s high-mix, low-volume production made it difficult to cost-effectively automate many processes such as repetitive, manual machine tending and welding tasks—especially with no prior robotics experience. Additional challenges for the machine tending application included parts that are oily from upstream machine processes, making them difficult for a robot to accurately pick and place, but a wash station between processes would add costs and delays.

A single UR5 cobot is easily moved between machines and processes to automate multiple tasks, including machine tending and welding. The ActiNav UR+ Application Kit for flexible machine loading automates a wide range of processes, such as drilling, chamfering, and threading parts without needing a wash station between processes. The ActiNav application will ultimately process 1,500 different part numbers.

In the first six months, the UR cobot has welded tens of thousands of parts with no problems. Welding productivity has also surged. “Prior to the robot, we were averaging about a minute cycle time for a person to weld them manually,” Northway explains. “With the robot doing the TIG welding, you simply drop the parts in the fixture, clamp it down and hit start, and it welds that part now in 14 seconds. Our throughput is four to five times greater than having one person welding continuously.”

“The biggest challenge for us is to fulfil our customers’ demands in a cost efficient manner,” says Tadej Kovač, development manager in Izoelektro. “ Worldwide companies are optimizing their production processes so we started considering automatization as well. Robots are the future and especially in electric components manufacturing where we face strong every-day competition, so we started looking for a suitable robotic solution.”

Due to its small size, the company cannot afford a traditional industrial automation system. Collaborative robots can offer many different and more affordable options. “Universal Robots brand is recognized worldwide, they offer good quality for a very good price, so in the end it was not a difficult decision,” adds Kovač.

The company conducted a risk assessment of the robot installation which concluded that no safety caging was necessary due to the robot’s collaborative nature and built-in safety features. Despite having no prior experience with robots, the first project deployment was completed in less than two weeks from the cobot’s delivery. The technical support provided by Universal Robots helped the quick implementation.

The first project included two operation tasks as product routine testing processes for low voltage surge arresters and medium voltage surge arresters where the robot was applied. A future application is to include product routine testing of tensile load for tension composite insulators and post line composite insulators. The company is also looking for the robot to assemble the core of the tension and post line composite insulators.

The UR5 cobot now works in product testing, a time consuming process high on the company’s wishlist to automate. Using a UR+ enabled gribber from Robotiq, the robot took over the most repetitive jobs leaving employees to concentrate on more value-added tasks.

“At first we didn’t have any experience but the technical support sessions that Universal Robots offered us made everything much easier. There are still many functions where we could use more robots and we definitely will in the future,” says Kovač.

The robot made a huge difference in Izoelektro production. A robot can work for eight hours straight in one shift with consistent efficiency, which cannot be achieved by any person. The production and testing time of each product is much faster, reducing the overall production cost as human errors are eliminated.

The UR helped to shorten the production time and costs. Other important benefits include an increase of product quality, productivity growth, and improved safety conditions for employees. The bottom line is the fast ROI: Izoelektro estimates the time for repayment will be between 18 and 24 months.