Bob Rochelle, logistics market specialist/area sales manager at Güdel in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be giving a presentation on getting started with robotics on April 3 from 8 am to 11 am at Automate 2017 in Chicago.
Rochelle received his bachelor’s and master’s degree in engineering from Virginia Tech; his industrial-automation career spans more than 30 years, in which he’s held positions in engineering, sales, general management and consulting. Rochelle is a veteran speaker for industry groups, has taught engineering at the university and community-college level, and he led a committee writing the first sanitation standard for industrial robots in the food processing industry. Rochelle is a past member of the Robotic Industries Association (RIA, www.robotics.org) board of directors. Contact him at [email protected].
When you decide to look at automation to increase efficiency, increase production rates, improve consistency and reduce the number of non-value-added tasks that your labor performs, it would be wise to consider robot-based automation. Robots have limitations but where applicable they can pay rich dividends when properly deployed. Robotics industry professionals will be happy to guide you in this process and will not make the mistake of trying to apply this technology where it does not fit.
So, how do you get started with robotics? First, have a robot industry veteran evaluate your processes and look for tasks that are dangerous to the human performing them, boring or repetitive tasks, heavy tasks that require excessive exertion or lifting that requires more than one person to perform, high-speed manual moves and tasks that do not require human thought to make a decision (Figure 1).
Applications exist in your processes. Some can be performed with a standard robot-based automation system, and others may require the design of a system with some level of customization (Figure 2). For example, if the process identified is welding, there are a number of commercially available robot welding systems that are mature designs and may fit your application perfectly. Using one of these standard systems avoids the cost of custom design. And by custom we do not mean 100% ground-up design. Most often automation systems are created by combining readily available peripheral equipment, and the customization is only to fit it to your production process and plant requirements.