Collaborative robots are an entirely new category of robots that automate processes in industry. To be precise – they debuted in 2008 in the form of Universal Robots’ UR5 model, which was used to operate a CNC machine. This was done for the first time ever without a safety cage. The revolution had begun. But safety was only one key ingredient in the recipe for success [more on safety and normative aspects of collaborative robots]. The other, equal factor for the success of the technology was the business aspect, which is what we will focus on in this article.
The industrial world is changing. Global competition is growing, value chains are becoming more elaborate. Where the best manage to create trends, the rest must contend with constant change. Batch sizes are declining and subject to greater seasonal fluctuations, the concepts of pop-up factories (pop-up factory) or mass customization (mass customization) are emerging. All of this is compounded by the phenomenon of an increasingly widespread shortage of labor – something that has been going on in Western European countries for a long time, and is now entering all corners of Poland – and the continuing rise in labor costs.
Let’s not hide it, for years Poland benefited from low labor costs and easy access to human resources. That, however, has changed. The people are not there, and migration from the East will not fill the shortage. Labor costs are rising. What’s more, while we were basing ourselves as a country on low costs, countries where shortages already existed (especially the German economy, but also the Czech Republic, for example) were automating. Today, the robotization level of the German economy is almost 10 times that of the Polish economy, and that of the Czech economy is more than 3 times. This translates directly into the competitiveness of companies.
After this (rather long) introduction, we can move on to collaborative robots
Collaborative robots – cobots, were created with one idea: to enable robotization to reach small companies. Remove the stigma of exclusivity from robotization, in the name of which it was a solution only for large and rich companies. Collaborative robots by their aspects such as safety, ease of programming – without programming, flexibility in changing applications, small size were supposed to reach everyone for whom the production or machining process is repetitive enough to make it worthwhile to spend a dozen-something minutes to configure a robot to perform it.
Cobots are most often used for lifting and handling (pick and place), packaging and palletizing, CNC machine tending, injection mold handling, quality control, or simple assembly. More advanced applications may involve gluing, painting, welding or surface treatment. Generally, all those routinized activities that are normally performed by entry-level manual workers, most often in jobs that are unpopular… Because they are tedious, boring, hard (in the number of repetitions), and the routine causes errors. Robots will do their work: accurately, repetitively, with a constant pace, every day when necessary for three shifts, 24/7.
Also find out why cobots won’t take jobs away from human workers.
Business benefits that will come from “hiring” a collaborative robot
- Stability of production on the job.
- Increased productivity for certain applications.
- Increase in the production capacity of the plant – understood as a better use of existing human resources (allowing employees to perform more creative and productive activities) with greater use of machinery and equipment resources.
- Reduction in costs – understood as a reduction in the cost of a human position directly assigned to the site, no turnover costs, no costs of duplication of FTEs (to guarantee continuity in case of vacations/sickness, etc.).
- No costs typically associated with a position robotized by an industrial robot – i.e., no costs for advanced integration, building security, having a full-time (or outsourced) roboticist, automation, programmer.
- Increase the flexibility of existing hardware resources through better utilization.
- Begin the process of enterprise automation based on the cobot. The control cabinet of a collaborative robot as well as its operating system have a number of capabilities to manage other machines.
Not all of these points will be applicable to every enterprise, that much is obvious. However, each of them may translate into broad improvements in competitiveness.
Flexibility of application
In addition to the financial benefits, flexibility is the second most important among the business advantages of cobots.
Flexibility is the broad applicability of cobots. To make this possible, they are constructed with numerous possibilities in terms of movement: lifting capacity, speed, flexibility, but also the possibilities of their software – intuitive, easy to use, minimizing the learning curve. All these postulates are realized by Kassow Robots cobots. The key factor here is excellent software, the selection of optimal parameters – payload to reach, as well as the use of the 7th axis.
The seventh axis sets Kassow robots apart, as the typical robot on the market has six of them. So what does increasing the number of degrees of freedom by one provide compared to brands such as Universal Robots, HCR Hanwha, Doosan, Omron-Techman and others? It is:
- working from around the corner – which means easy access to the machine (e.g. CNC) while the robot is not working,
- working in tight spaces – optimizing the space, no need to reorganize it,
- possibility to work on a workpiece approaching it from different sides,
- the ability to maintain the tool vector over a very wide range of movements,
- the ability to adjust the robot’s movement to make it safer for bystanders
… and much more. You can find more about how the 7 axes work here.
To sum up – the use of collaborative robots is, on the one hand, a complex issue – certainly requiring analysis and thought. But its advantages, if the boundary conditions of the enterprise (even micro) are met, can bring a real qualitative leap in the life of the company. Raising its stability, profitability, or restoring opportunities for growth.
We also invite you to the first part of this text on cobots in technical terms.
