ROBOTS | TECHNOLOGY
The interest in robots has moved from simple pick-and- place to giving them more complex tasks and discovering how ‘cobots’ can be used collaboratively. Peter Mapleston speaks to robot technology groups
Doing much more with robots and cobots
As manufacturing continues to trend from mass production to mass customisation, plastics injection moulders are searching for ways to efficiently adapt to higher mix, lower volume manufacturing. Processors are increasingly finding that robotic technology provides the flexibility they need to execute fast product changeovers with minimal machine downtime. On top of that, during production itself, robots
are taking on more handling tasks, often carrying them out more precisely and consistently than is possible with manual labour. Fully automatic production cells are becoming more prevalent, thanks in part to their increasing cost-effectiveness and facility with which they can be programmed. One piece of evidence of this trend comes from Engel, one of the world’s biggest producers of injection machines which also has substantial in-house robotics and automation capability: it says that over the last five years, its revenue on automa- tion projects has more than doubled. When complete automation is not possible, or
desirable, options are increasing in systems that have robots working interactively with production
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team members – so-called cobots. Walter Aumayr is Vice President of Automation
and Periphery at Engel. Asked why automation is now so much more than simply placing a robot onto a machine, he says: “One frequent cause is the constant progress of process integration. Automa- tion is not only about quality, but more and more about efficiency, which includes energy and material efficiency as well as higher space productivity.”
System solutions He says: “Intelligent automation concepts are enabling completely new production processes and even completely new products, which require automation to be produced in a consistent quality. We ‘tailor’ automation solutions precisely to our customers’ respective requirements. To achieve this, we are increasingly integrating several robots of various types and sizes into one production system, and in combination with custom-designed automation components.” What is important is that Engel combines the
controls of all individual systems on a central control panel, says Aumayr’s colleague Reinhard
April 2018 | INJECTION WORLD 15
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