ROBOTICS
THE FUTURE OF COLLABORATIVE BUSINESS
Dr Paul Rivers, CEO Guidance Automation, explores increased robot collaboration, and how to keep robots working hard
almost daily. For example, the rapid growth of ecommerce over the years is showing no signs of slowing, with online sales due to account for over 50% of retail sales over the next decade. Within the UK, online spend is predicted to increase 29.6% by 2024, with more than 50% of UK consumers now choosing to shop online over the high street. This means the demand for warehouse workers is growing at a rapid rate, creating an even greater need for automation. In order to keep up with rising demand,
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industries are turning to solutions that can supplement the existing workforce with robotics, paving the way for the collaborative robot, or cobot. By augmenting human labour with cobots that can take on the repetitive or even dangerous tasks, the human workforce can be freed up to perform the skilled tasks out of reach of machines. But as robotic technology is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, enabling robots to perform roles with accuracy, consistency and safety front of mind, this has also advanced the ability of robot to robot communication around the facility. The more we try to replicate human activity
through robotics, the more sensors are required to replace the things we take for granted as humans. While it is possible to replace a human in virtually all picking and
obotics is being used in a variety of industries and applications, with new use cases being defined
manufacturing aspects, there are still intricacies which can only be handled by a human worker. This is where cobots win over. Above all, the real gain from cobots is from
identifying the tasks in your facility that can be automated or improved with automation, but still keeping the human worker doing the tasks which are currently too expensive or intricate to do via a robot. Often, the process has to be changed to adapt for automation or part automation, so the human might be doing part of a task, in a different way to how they were doing so before. As technology costs reduce, the capability
of the robot increases. Collaboration will switch completely over the next decade; from humans doing all or some of the work, through more and more task sharing and then eventually transitioning to the robot doing virtually all the repetitive process. For this collaboration to work well,
communication is key. Both humans and robots need to know and understand what is needed by the other for a good partnership to work. For example: Conveyor systems: Intelligent collaboration
between a static and mobile conveyor would allow transfers to take place without the need for the mobile conveyor to stop. The main benefit being maximised throughput - i.e. more
items transferred. For transfers to work effectively, inter-system communication is critical. Independent pick wall application. An
integrated collaborative solution allows for pick technology to direct the operative according to optimal pick sequence and placement based on the location of the operative and autonomous vehicle. Intelligent pick planning also allows multiple picks to be allocated to a vehicle. Increasing vehicle speeds between pick points and optimising transport routes to pick to drop points, by knowledge of all other movements in the working area, also reduces the overall process time, maximising throughput. All transport collaboration: Currently, there
are various vehicle types in operation, a mix of manual drive and autonomous. Often different vehicles have no means to communicate. This leads to transport inefficiencies, but if all vehicles communicate and are consequently aware of each other, intelligent routing will optimise transport to avoid congestion. Communication will remain a key factor for
human-robot collaboration. Tablets, touch screens, buttons, barcode scans and voice systems can all be used to enable humans to instruct AMRs on the tasks to be performed. Robots still have a need for time out. After
spending hours constantly moving around, they will need ‘break time’ to recharge. Most facilities will have a place to charge if there is a regular waiting point, but in many cases, the mobile vehicle will move to a charging area. If the robots don’t need to use the charging
room, they certainly will need to use the maintenance room. The parts that need the most inspection and care take some time to understand, and so the maintenance programmes are usually based on years of statistics and performance results. This should prevent them from spending too much time in the robot tea room of the future!
Guidance Automation
www.guidanceautomation.com
20 JUNE 2021 | PROCESS & CONTROL
Communication will remain a key factor for human- robot collaboration
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