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Vision-guided collaborative
robots deliver fast return on
investment in production of
firehose valves
T
ask 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 prod-
uct quality consistent. The Indiana-based manufacturer has now installed four collaborative Univer-
sal 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 how-
ever, were dedicated to working only on the machine they were installed with and could not be rede-
ployed 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 any-
thing 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.”
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“Now it only takes about one hour per operator per TWO UR5 ROBOTS WORKING IN TANDEM
shift to operate the robot, which includes laying out Having the two UR5 robots work in tandem has
parts and staging the robot. That means the robot is also helped optimize production. As blanks arrive
running for 21 hours unassisted, so we’re looking at on an inbound conveyor, the first UR5 robot uses
savings of just about 34 days to pay for the robot,” vision guidance to identify and pick up the blanks,
says the Production Supervisor mentioning the then inserts the blank into the first milling machine.
added benefits: The UR5 then takes out the half machined part
already in the lathe and hands it over to the other
“That’s 7 hours of time in each shift you’re saving UR5. The second robot inserts that part into the
for that person to be off doing something else that’s second machine, takes out the complete machined
adding to productivity.” part and places it on the outbound conveyor,
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where an operator places the parts onto anodizing VISION GUIDANCE REQUIRED NO
racks, completing the cycle. SCRIPTING
Both the robot handoff and the vision guidance use
It’s a process that - as Task Force Tips’ Automation the MODBUS communication protocol registers in
Specialist Adam Hessling puts it - looks very impres- the UR robots controller.
sive, but was deceivingly easy to do. He refers to “Using MODBUS made the communication be-
himself as a “journeyman machinist” with no specific tween the two robots very easy to do. Through
robotics programming experience: the touchscreen that comes with the robot, we
just set the way-points that we want the robots to
“My background is all in CNC programming, but move through and the two robots confirm back
I just used the Universal Robots support website and forth to each other that they are where they
and got a lot of really good information from there are supposed to be,” explains Hessling, detailing
and wound up being able to put together the two- the vision guidance:
robot machining cell doing the hose couplings
without any external help. If you understand just “You can have discreet inputs and outputs just like
basic logic, you can do an unbelievable amount a normal PLC would have or you can do register
with Universal Robots.” values, which is what we use to do the coordinates
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something is wrong,” says Hessling who has pro- “I would estimate that the robot fixes the “failure to
grammed the robot to then apply an air blast to try load” issue about three or four times per hour, which
and clean whatever debris is in the way. has really helped us eliminate downtime. The opera-
tor only needs to intervene about once per shift,
The robot will go through the air blast several times sometimes never. This is no fault of the robots; it is
and if it still can’t place the part, the robot tells the just the nature of the aluminum we are machining
machine to execute a “chuck wash” cycle, which and the type of chips it creates,” explains Hessling.
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 an-
other popup which halts the program entirely. The
operator can then diagnose the problem, fix it, and
restart production.
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cell. Cory Mack and his team are busy testing the
many application potentials:
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Universal Robots is dedicated to bringing safe, flexible and easy to use 6 axis industrial robotic
arms to businesses of every size, all over the world. We develop industrial collaborative robot
arms that automate and streamline repetitive industrial processes. This approach enables pro-
duction departments to assign their staff members more enjoyable tasks – creating jobs that
provide them with new challenges that add value to the company.
Our three different collaborative robots are easily integrated into existing production environ-
ments. With six articulation points, and a wide scope of flexibility, the collaborative robot arms
are designed to mimic the range of motion of a human arm.
Collaborative Robots 10