Increasing Production with Collaborative Robots

Walt Machine President Tommy Caughey waited years to pull the trigger on a collaborative robot for his high-precision optical parts business. He struggled with the suggestion that installing a robotic vision system might be more difficult than it was worth and require extremely specialized expertise to execute properly.

Each year, the company receives a huge order for scientific camera assembly parts that strains his staff and creates a production bottleneck. Given the length of time it takes to train a new CNC operator compared to the actual production time required to fulfill the order, adding a seasonal employee never made economic sense.

Caughey says, “I saw Universal Robots at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) maybe four or six years ago, and I found it interesting: a robot that does not require any extra stuff. I followed up throughout the years and thought that’s where we needed to go one day.”

With the introduction of the Plug + Play vision camera and a gripper from Robotiq, concerns about complexity and contracting a robotic vision expert disappeared. “Either you take your part and set it on the surface where you want to pick it, and you take four snapshots of it in four different orientations, or, if it’s something simple like a rectangular or circular blank, you just set the dimensions of what you are picking, and (the cobot) knows.”

After years of pondering a robotic solution to accommodate a recurring annual production spike, the Universal Robots and Robotiq solution took him 10 minutes to set up.

Caughey runs his robot overnight in a “lights out” environment. While this initially made him anxious, he now says, “It’s just about letting it go and accepting the fact that it’s going to run for an extra four to six hours,” he says. “You’re going to go home and nothing’s going to break.”

Schedule a demo of Universal Robots collaborative robot arms and Robotiq vision sensors and grippers today.