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FourByThree proposes the development of a new generation of modular industrial robotic solutions that are suitable for efficient task execution in collaboration with humans in a safe way and are easy to use and program by the factory workers.

The project was active for three years, December 2014-2017.

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FourByThree on TV (Tecnopolis, EiTB, in Spanish)

Basque Public Television’s (EiTB’s) leading program on science and technology, Tecnopolis, featured a program on human-robot collaboration in industrial settings last Tuesday, February 16.

The program was recorded at IK4-TEKNIKER’s headquarters, where different research projects on this field were presented by Iñaki Maurtua, Autonomous and Smart systems Manager, and Loreto Susperregi, Coordinator of Robotics. The video (in Spanish) succeeds at explaining the basics of human-robot collaboration, as well as some of the current lines of research and many of the innovations that FourByThree aims to bring to the market.

FourByThree workshop at Technishow 2016 (Netherlands)

FourByThree will attend Technishow 2016, which will be held in Utrecht, Netherlands, on March 15-18 2016. Project partner STODT, in collaboration with IK4-TEKNIKER, is leading the effort to prepare a stand where attendants will have the opportunity to work with a robot in a collaborative way. These demonstrations will provide our researchers with relevant information on the user experience.

For the experiment, we will use a table, a collaborative robot plus gripper and vision system, as well as some parts and trays. Since the FourByThree robot will not be available by the tradeshow, a commercial Universal Robots UR10 model will be used.

Attendants will be asked to perform different tasks with the robot:

  • Pointing gesture: The participant first points one part and a target position. The robot moves the part from origin to destination.
  • Collaboration: The participant and the robot have to move different parts in the same working area, with the possibility of interferences.
  • Manual gidance: The participant moves by using his/her hands the robot above one part. The robot records the point and moves the part to a destination.

The objective of the experiment is to gain knowledge of human perception with respect fenceless robotics and collaboration mechanisms, by means of the test, observation and questionnaires. If you are attending Technishow 2016, please visit FourByThree’s stand and you’ll have the chance to experience human-robot collaboration first-hand!

Video update from Magdeburg, Germany

On October, members of the FourByThree consortium traveled to Magdeburg, Germany, for a plenary meeting hosted at Fraunhofer-IFF’s headquarters. This gathering was the perfect occasion to shoot a new video update on the project. In the video, project partners as well as EU expert Sasha Jevtic explain the project’s features, its current status and the next steps. Another video on the projection-based interaction and safeguarding system that Fraunhofer-IFF is developing was also produced for internal use by members of the consortium.

Technology watch

Vision-Guided Collaborative Robots Deliver Fast ROI

Source: Robotic Industries Association

Task Force Tips, a manufacturer of firefighting equipment, wanted to promote and maximize their personnel tending machining cells into more complex tasks while keeping spindle time up and product quality consistent. The Indiana-based manufacturer has now installed four collaborative Universal Robots delivering savings resulting in a return on their investment in only 34 days.

CEO of Task Force Tips, Stewart McMillan, still remember his father looking up at him with pen in hand saying “Are you sure about this?” when the family-owned company bought their first CNC machine forty years ago.
“It was a huge step. But giving people the proper tools to do their job is essential to being productive,” says McMillan, who started integrating robots with machine tools as far back as 1990. Those robots however, were dedicated to working only on the machine they were installed with and could not be redeployed to other tasks:

“So what happens is the machine wears out first and now you have a $100,000 robot that you can’t do anything with. We had heard of collaborative robots that could be used in a much more flexible manner, so we decided to explore this new technology.”

“Like a PlayStation video game”

Production Supervisor at Task Force Tips, Cory Mack, recalls how within literally minutes of the Universal Robots demo coming in, his colleagues were already trying to figure out how to program it and make it work:

“The Universal Robot is so simple and non-intimidating that our programmers were already in the mindset of I don’t need any guidance, I can do this on my own. It was almost like a PlayStation video game where they could pick up the controller and figure it out without reading the rules to the game.”

Flexible robots as a paradigm shift

Task Force Tips installed one UR10 robot and two UR5 robots to tend CNC machines, a fourth UR5 is mounted to a table on wheels and moved between tasks. The UR robots can work collaboratively right alongside TFT employees due to a built-in safety feature causing the robots to automatically stop operating when they encounter obstacles in their route. A scenario McMillan calls “a fundamental paradigm shift”:

“A major impediment in the past to using robots was the security fencing required around the machine. The beautiful thing about the UR Robots is you don’t need all that guarding.  We can roll the table with the robot right up to the machine and in a few minutes teach the robot to load parts. They become kind of a partner to a person that goes around and helps them with the drudgery.”

From 7 to 3 operators required to run the cell

Task Force Tips has their production layout set up in a non-traditional cell format with operators running multiple machines simultaneously round the clock. Mack explains how the UR robots have reduced staffing requirements from seven to three operators:

“Now it only takes about one hour per operator per shift to operate the robot, which includes laying out parts and staging the robot. That means the robot is running for 21 hours unassisted, so we’re looking at savings of just about 34 days to pay for the robot,” says the Production Supervisor mentioning the added benefits:

“That’s 7 hours of time in each shift you’re saving for that person to be off doing something else that’s adding to productivity.”

Two UR5s working in tandem

Having the two UR5 robots work in tandem has also helped optimize production. As blanks arrive on an inbound conveyor, the first UR5 robot uses vision guidance to identify and pick up the blanks, then inserts the blank into the first milling machine. The UR5 then takes out the half machined part already in the lathe and hands it over to the other UR5. The second robot inserts that part into the second machine, takes out the complete machined part and places it on the outbound conveyor, where an operator places the parts onto anodizing racks, completing the cycle.

It’s a process that – as Task Force Tips’ Automation Specialist Adam Hessling puts it – looks very impressive, but was deceivingly easy to do. He refers to himself as a “journeyman machinist” with no specific robotics programming experience:

“My background is all in CNC programming, but I just used the Universal Robots support website and got a lot of really good information from there and wound up being able to put together the two-robot machining cell doing the hose couplings without any external help. If you understand just basic logic, you can do an unbelievable amount with Universal Robots.”

Vision guidance required no scripting

Both the robot handoff and the vision guidance use the MODBUS communication protocol registers in the UR robots controller.

“Using MODBUS made the communication between the two robots very easy to do. Through the touchscreen that comes with the robot, we just set the way-points that we want the robots to move through and the two robots confirm back and forth to each other that they are where they are supposed to be,” explains Hessling, detailing the vision guidance:

“You can have discreet inputs and outputs just like a normal PLC would have or you can do register values, which is what we use to do the coordinates for the camera. MODBUS registers that it can output and we just send the coordinates to the MODBUS registers in the Universal Robot’s controller that generates the way-points of the parts and directs the robot there. It didn’t involve any scripting at all,” says the TFT Automation Specialist, who calls it a very clean installation:

“All of the communication we did was through our computer network, nothing is actually hard wired together.”

Force detection identifies product issues

When the UR5 places the unmachined part in the lathe, the robot’s force detection will identify if the part is misshapen, has some burs from the saw cut or if there are machining chips in the chuck jaws.

“When the robot tries to reach the set waypoint for placement and there’s an obstruction which causes the force on the end of arm to exceed 50 Newton; which I programmed as the threshold, it knows something is wrong,” says Hessling who has programmed the robot to then apply an air blast to try and clean whatever debris is in the way.

The robot will go through the air blast several times and if it still can’t place the part, the robot tells the machine to execute a “chuck wash” cycle, which uses the machine’s high pressure coolant system to dislodge debris from the chuck jaws. If the part still can’t load after the coolant wash, the popup appears on the robot’s touchscreen, instructing the operator to clear any debris from the chuck jaws and press continue. If the issue persists, there is another popup which halts the program entirely. The operator can then diagnose the problem, fix it, and restart production.

“I would estimate that the robot fixes the “failure to load” issue about three or four times per hour, which has really helped us eliminate downtime. The operator only needs to intervene about once per shift, sometimes never. This is no fault of the robots; it is just the nature of the aluminum we are machining and the type of chips it creates,” explains Hessling.

Product quality increased

Freeing up personnel from machine tending has also played an important role in increased product quality.

“When our employees are not worried about keeping a machine running all the time, they have a lot more time to visually inspect the machined products. Part quality has really gone to a whole other level with the UR Robot in place, while allowing our personnel to come up with new ideas and better ways to improve our production,” says the TFT Production Supervisor.

CEO McMillan adds:

“When you set people loose with a way to reduce the mundane labor in their daily job, they find those ways. There’s been multiple days where I’ve come in and see the robot somewhere else in the shop that surprised to me.  I don’t see our possibilities being limited on places we can use these.”

Future applications: deburring, laser and packaging

The next UR robot application at TFT will likely be at a deburring station within the CNC machining cell. Cory Mack and his team are busy testing the many application potentials:

“Right now a person is having to Scotch-Brite a part or deburr a part by hand again and again, taking time away from something else they could be doing, so we are testing concepts for how we’ll use the robots for deburring. We are also looking at packing and shipping parts, and we are talking about using the robots on our laser machine as well.  With the price that you can buy the Universal Robot for, it’s stuff that you’re willing to invest in knowing how quickly you can get the ROI back on it,” says Mack.

About Task Force Tips

Task Force Tips is a worldwide leader in providing first responders with high quality, innovative agent delivery solutions. The company based in Valparaiso, Indiana, manufactures a wide range of firefighting and water delivery products for municipal, rural, wildland, and military agencies around the globe.

About Universal Robots

Universal Robots pioneered collaborative robotics and remains a market leader and first mover within this emerging technology. The product portfolio includes the collaborative UR3, UR5 and UR10 robot arms named after their payloads in kilos. Since the first UR robot entered the market in 2008, the company has seen substantial growth with the user-friendly cobots now being sold in more than 50 countries worldwide.  Average payback period for UR robots is the fastest in the industry with only 195 days. The company is headquartered in Odense, Denmark, where all development and production is carried out. Regional offices in North America are in Long Island, NY, Dallas, TX, Ann Arbor, MI, and Irvine, CA.

DHL Robots Sawyer and Baxter

Source: Rethink Robotics

http://theloadstar.co.uk/wp-content/uploads//Christmas-Sawyer-2-e1482503735617-680x0-c-default.jpg

DHL employees may be getting an unusual Christmas present, following the European trial of “collaborative” warehouse robots.

Supplied by Rethink Robotics, Sawyer and Baxter are warehouse robots being trialled across the continent on tasks including assembly, kitting, packaging and pre-retail services.

A spokesperson for DHL told The Loadstar this morning that the robots would work alongside, rather than replace, staff in improving efficiencies across the supply chain.

“Looking and talking about how new technologies can be applied in our dynamic industry is part of DHL’s responsibility as industry leader. How these are applied, and how they support and work alongside humans across the supply chain are key to our research.

“Far from replacing people, we are looking into how robots can support our employees and where it makes sense for humans and machines to work together.”

However, Matthias Heutger, senior vice president for strategy, marketing and innovation at DHL Customer Solutions & Innovation, said that, historically, industrial robots had failed to integrate in distribution practices as they struggled with variability.

“In our recently published report, Robotics in Logistics, we found that 80% of logistics facilities today are still manual due to the complexity of the operations,” said Mr Heutger. “As technology improves, however, the logistics industry is benefiting from the adoption of collaborative robots to improve efficiency.”

The test period will determine how best DHL can integrate robots into its global operations.

The firm has already purchased its first robot, to research its adaptability to 3D printing tasks and the possibility of creating specialised grippers to allow further warehouse tasks to be undertaken by robots.

Adrian Kumar, vice president of solutions design North America at DHL Supply Chain, said Sawyer and Baxter were among the most advanced on the market, adding that the firm planned to deploy them in a variety of packaging and inventory tasks. This, he said, would free up human employees for higher-value work.

“By deploying these robots to work in tandem with humans, we can ensure our production lines are adjusting to changes and running more efficiently year-round,” added Mr Kumar.

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