ROBOTICS
The growth in popularity of collaborative robots is driving innovation and increases in capacity
Cobots drive growth A
utomation in manufacturing, testing and distribution is continuing to gather significant pace, due in part to the trend towards using cobots (collaborative robots) on tasks that require some human input. One area where collaborative robotics is gaining ground is welding and fabrication. Universal Robots, for example, has grown its welding application segment by more than 80 per cent during this year alone as partners are developing new capabilities for the company’s latest range of cobot welders.
WELDING COBOTS Previously dismissed as too heavy-duty a task for cobots, welding is now the fastest growing application segment for Universal Robots (UR) with the company expecting to ship well over 1,200 welding cobots this year. Since the first UR cobot-powered welder made its debut in 2017, a number of companies now standardise their machinery on the basis of UR products, including Vectis Automation with its Park’N’Arc welder, which has a rotational range extender that allows for the base of the cobot to be manually moved to various locations. Compared to a short linear track, the Park’N’Arc is an improved design for increasing range as the cobot base can be repositioned nearly 3m in a linear direction while maintaining simplicity, robust cable management and portability.
A similar approach to providing flexibility to welding equipment operators is the RT1 cobot-
20 /// Testing & Test Houses /// December 2022
controlled rotary table from Hirebotics and Kinetic Technologies, which is designed to maximise welding capacity by allowing the part being welded to be rotated to the front and back. It also gives users with high volume production requirements the ability to have separate load and weld stations; loading a part on one side while the cobot is welding on the other, increasing arc on-time and throughput.
BIN PICKING AND MACHINE TENDING Picking unstructured parts out of bins is another traditionally challenging task to automate, something which Precision Cobotics has solved with a UR5 cobot, which is able to pick a shiny metal part from a randomised bin and place it into a laser marking machine. The UR5 is guided by Apera AI’s new UR+ certified Vue Vision software that accurately locates and places the part. According to Eric Petz, head of marketing at Apera, robotic bin picking systems often struggle with shiny or complex objects and usually have much longer cycle times than a human performing the same actions. “The Vue Vision software provides the industry’s fastest total vision cycle time, as low as 0.3 seconds, and operates under ambient light using standard cameras, so the user does not need expensive specialist equipment,” he says. Universal Robotics has also recently introduced a 20kg payload cobot, the UR20, which greatly expands automation opportunities, such as the ability to reach further into machines, tend several machines in the same cycle, and handle 25 per cent
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