Information briefs for the week check out the brand new pattern in manufacturing known as microfactories—the place robots rule, a first-ever, ready-to-use 3D printing cupboard, T-skin security sheathing for cobots and industrial robots, and a do-it-yourself 3D printed cobot for desktop manufacturing.
Microfactories: The place robots rule!
Are microfactories the way forward for manufacturing? There’s a manufacturing facility automation pattern that’s simply starting to take maintain that deviates radically from the usual meeting line, particularly these in auto crops. Korea’s Hyundai has constructed such a very totally different auto plant for its electrical automobile manufacturing (EV) in Singapore.
The Hyundai plant is made up of pods or cells the place 60% of the manufacturing of the Ioniq 5 EV is achieved by robots (see video); the remaining 40% is accomplished by human employees alone or in partnership with robots.
The web-net relating to workers is that it makes use of solely 100 employees to provide 30,000 automobiles a 12 months. In pod assemblies, robots rule!
Alpesh Patel, VP of Innovation at Hyundai, thinks {that a} microfactory’s cell manufacturing methodology may properly be customary in just a few years. General price discount to fabricate is 50% lower than a standard or totally customized automated line. “It is because modules use 70% of the identical parts (body, energy, security, conveyor system).” Plus, improvement and meeting time is often 50% lower than a totally automated customized line.
“Within the cells” writes Suvrat Kothari, “robots set up parts of a automotive, earlier than transferring to the subsequent zone. The important thing differentiator is that the cells will be programmed with particular directions, proper from putting in parts for various variants of the identical automotive, or to engaged on a very totally different mannequin. Conventional meeting strains would want vital retooling for comparable adaptability.”
The cells are linked collectively by a typical conveyor and feeder system, able to offering excessive quantity, excessive combine manufacturing functionality.
Modular automation can scale up or down simply. “Relying on the complexity of the product or sub-assembly, producers can simply count on to get 3-4k models’ per hour (UPH), or 1 million models a month.”
Prepared-to-use 3D printing robotic
Market want: Prepared-to-use, turn-key system offering an environment friendly, quick, and secure answer for manufacturing steel 3D printed elements, 
particularly with chrome steel, nickel, and titanium. To satisfy the necessity, Spain’s Meltio and US-based One Off Robotics partnered for the manufacturing of a self-enclosed 3D printing cupboard.
Meltio is a producer and developer of wire-laser steel 3D printing applied sciences, and One Off Robotics is a builder of robotic arm fabrication methods for additive, subtractive, and hybrid manufacturing processes.
In combining their applied sciences, they declare a first-ever, turn-key answer to offer industries with an environment friendly additive manufacturing work cell named the One Off Robotics Cell. In response to Meltio Product Supervisor, Alejandro Nieto, “This new {hardware} system permits the client to obtain a ready-to-use cell for robotic steel 3D printing, eradicating the combination course of and lengthy meeting lead occasions.”
With a deposition charge of as much as 1 kg an hour, this technique produces totally dense elements which might be mechanically equal or superior to these created from conventional means.
The One Off Robotics Cell seamlessly integrates management of the system, permitting the person to simply alter settings for fast printing. Its 8-axis system simplifies printing of advanced geometries and is configured to work with the Meltio House robotic slicer.
Security pores and skin stops robots immediately
Maintaining employees secure from cobots has all the time been a priority; extra so with cobots than customary industrial robots, that are normally segregated from employees by fencing or partitions.
In 2016, FANUC launched contact-sensing cobot security padding which have been polyurethane foam pads utilized to the outside of cobot arms. Stopping time in 2016 was 9 milliseconds.
Practically ten years on, Taiwan-based Touche Options (previously named Mechavision) has just lately developed a contact-sensing movie of security materials that’s additionally utilized to the outside of not solely cobot arms but additionally to these of business robotic arms. Referred to as T-skin, it has a stopping time of 1 millisecond. Need to understand how lengthy a millisecond is? Try the video beneath.
Touche Options’ founder and chairman, Camus Su, and basic supervisor, Liu Changhe, are graduates of the Industrial Know-how Analysis Institute (ITRI). Their collaboration in 2017 led to Touche Options, which emphasizes “tactile sensing expertise to set off emergency stops in robots, serving as a vital security measure past visible and lightweight grids.”
The founders declare that T-Pores and skin, was developed based mostly on the ISO customary unit of 10 newtons (1kgf) that triggers emergency stops in response to an exterior drive of 1 kilogram, inside 1 millisecond, and is unaffected by both electromagnetic waves or RF.
A major goal of Touche Options is “to outfit conventional industrial robots with collaborative [cobot] capabilities, which has garnered fast recognition from main Japanese robotics firms (FANUC, Kawasaki, and many others.).
All of which means industrial robots can now, with the addition of T-skin, tackle jobs previously meant just for cobots working in and round individuals.
DIY 3D printed desktop cobot
Bought a small-shop enterprise with a number of desktop manufacturing wants? Want a stable academic cobot arm for studying tasks? Need to market and promote cobots on-line to a worldwide viewers? Introducing the award-winning PAROL6 (Supply Robotics).
Roboticist Petar Crnjak is hoping to convey industrial-style robotic arms to a wider viewers with an open-source 3D-printable six-axis design dubbed the PAROL6 — providing assist for a powerful 2.2lbs (1kg) payload.
Crnjak says his “PAROL6 is a high-performance, 3D-printed desktop robotic arm, with a design strategy just like ” of his creation. “The design strategy of PAROL6 was to be comparable “to industrial robots when it comes to mechanical design, management software program, and value. Management software program, GUI [Graphical User Interface], and PAROL6’s STL recordsdata are open supply.” Apart from a pneumatic gripper, every axis is pushed by a stepper motor, with at the very least just a few of those axes being pushed by means of a steel planetary gearbox for additional precision and torque.
Relying on ones’ stage of experience, PAROL 6, with entry to a 3D printer and on-line design specs (free), it may be a DIY venture; it additionally is available in equipment type; or bought able to go straight out of the field for $3.200 (3,000 euros).
“By pairing industrial mechanical design with state-of-the-art software program and electronics, the PAROL6 robotic can obtain clean motions, excessive speeds, and excessive repeatability. PAROL6 is constructed with training, analysis, and small automation in thoughts!”
