INDUSTRY News ABB COLUMN
ROBOTS – THE LOGICAL CHOICE FOR LOGISTICS
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Bart Houben, VP of sales and marketing, Pickit (left), and Samuel Bouchard, CEO, Robotiq (right)
Industry leaders partner over high-performance solutions
Robotiq, Pickit and Festo have joined forces to help manufacturers automate their production faster and increase their ROI. “We are proud to be working with Pickit and Festo, both industry leaders in their respective fields of 3D vision and industrial linear motion. Our shared commitment to getting factories automated quickly, easily and efficiently will be multiplied by combining our expertise,” said Samuel Bouchard, CEO of Robotiq.
3D-vision solutions supplier Pickit brings its industrial automation product range to the partnership, which combined with Robotiq’s ease-of-use and quick integration approach will allow manufacturers to benefit from a new range of all-in-one solutions for faster production. The two companies’ technologies have previously been used together in bin-picking applications, leveraging Pickit’s 3D vision and Robotiq’s quick-to-production grippers. With the new strategic partnership, Robotiq and Pickit will develop even more advanced solutions for the manufacturing world.
“We’ve worked together in the past and we are excited to launch what we’re creating together,” said Bart Houben, VP of sales and marketing at Pickit.
Industrial linear motion specialist Festo is also contributing with its technologies to the partnership.
“Festo Canada and Robotiq worked closely together to make this partnership a success,” said Achim Kottmann, product manager at Festo. “We are looking forward to launching joint products that will widen access to cobot applications for even more manufacturers.”
obot-led automation can make a tremendous difference to the efficiency, accuracy and flexibility of logistics operations. With e-commerce and omnichannel distribution set to transform the way consumers purchase and receive goods, robotic automation offers an increasingly logical solution for logistics. Now more than ever, there is the expectation of being able to order a diverse range
of products, from food to flat-packed furniture, with delivery to their door the very next day, if not sooner. While this may have seemed unreasonable ten, or even five years ago, meeting this need is quite literally part and parcel of keeping today’s consumers happy, particularly at the present time as getting to the shops has become more difficult. For busy warehouses and distribution centres, robotic automation has been shown to deliver a demonstrable return on investment through increased efficiency, higher throughput, enhanced accuracy and improved customer satisfaction through consistent quality. It also offers flexibility as a way of future-proofing logistics operations to help meet changing consumer tastes both in terms of the products they want and how they want to receive them. Like others, the logistics sector has been cautious about switching to unfamiliar technologies, with operators eager to see working examples of systems performing the same or similar functions. However, while fully-automated warehouses and distribution centres still tend to remain the exception rather than the rule, there has been a growing interest in deploying robot automation to handle a growing range of tasks as users have become more aware of the potential benefits it can offer. Whether as part of an FMCG end-of-line operation, retail distribution
centre, e-commerce fulfilment site or parcel-sorting facility, robotic automation offers a wide range of functions. Four key areas within logistics roles include: item picking, palletising, depalletising and repalletising, robotic storage and retrieval systems, as well as singulation and sortation. Robotics can make inefficient, imprecise and potentially unsafe manual routines efficient, reliably precise and much safer. For many in logistics, the coronavirus lockdown and its consequences have served to underscore the importance of systems which are flexible in ways that might never have been envisaged in the past. An experienced partner in logistics automation will always bear in mind these and many other possibilities for tomorrow, without losing sight of today’s necessities. For more visit:
http://bit.ly/ABBRobotics_Logistics2020.
Nigel Platt LBL Manager, UK and Ireland, ABB Robotics
automationmagazine.co.uk
Automation | October 2020
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