Robotics evolves into new industries

With its background firmly rooted in the automotive industry, developments in technology are finally seeing robotics coming into its own in other industries too.

Vince West, manager of business development at Romheld Australia, explains how some of this new technology is being applied to the food and packaging industries and discusses future trends.

Traditionally, the market for robotics has been dominated by the automotive industry. Is this still the case or are you finding other industries now dominating or equalling the automotive industry with their robotic technology demands?

The automotive industry is still the dominant user of robots, in particular within body shops (spot welding and material handling), stamping plants (material handling) and machine/injection moulding shops (machine loading/unloading and deburring/trimming of finished parts).

However, the overall market is increasing mainly due to the wider spread use of robots in the packaging and palletising segment.

This segment is growing rapidly and has huge potential, as just about every product manufactured or produced, from biscuits through to bricks, must be packed and shipped.

Although the number of robots in use is currently not great, we are also witnessing increased demand for robot end-of-arm-tooling (EOAT) in areas that offer unlimited potential for large-scale use in the future.

For example, in the handling and processing of fresh food products. In the past year we have had enquiries for gripper systems to handle such things as pineapples, melons, carrots and prawns to name just a few.

How have these new demands influenced the products being developed?

Flexibility of robotic EOAT has increased greatly due to the demand for robots to multi-task and work non-stop. In the past, it was common to see robots stand idle for some of the time during a particular process, waiting for other sequences to finish, or while another robot was doing its task.

Today, robots are more likely to have no spare time due to the development of robotic quick-change tooling systems which allow fast changeover from one EOAT to another.

Similarly, flexible gripper systems, such as the Unigripper intelligent vacuum gripper system, enable one tool to process many items without the need for any changeover.

The emphasis is on EOAT that enables robots to complete a variety of tasks quickly and effectively, thereby increasing the overall productive capacity of the installation. It costs no more to have a robot working 100% of the time, rather than, say, 85% of the time, but the resultant output volume and return on investment rises significantly.

Discuss the key components of industrial robotics and how have these components developed over the past five years?

The availability of an increased range of flexible, standard robotic EOAT has enabled many new applications through prompt delivery, lower up-front costs and elimination of the risky design/development cycle for robot integrators.

These days it is possible to buy off-the-shelf gripper systems for specific and special applications that were not available five to 10 years ago, such as:

• Layer grippers that can handle virtually any product, in bottles, cans, boxes and tetra-packs etc, not only in singles, but also in groups, rows and even full layers. These layer grippers can be set up to handle not only the product being palletised, but also the intermediate slip-sheets and in some cases the pallet as well.

• Intelligent vacuum grippers in standard module sizes that can pack product into boxes, then place boxes into shippers and finally the shipper onto a pallet.

• Fresh food grippers with extreme hygienic design features (completely sealed polished stainless steel construction) that meet FDA requirements.

• Grippers with multiple movements for assembling O-rings to grooves in bores and on shafts.

• Clean room class grippers with integrated contamination pump.

• Servo-electric grippers with precise control over open/closing speed, grip force and gripping position with feedback.

Force and torque (F/T) sensors bring extra dimensions to robot capability. These devices can simultaneously measure both applied force and torque in three axes and enable robots to simulate or respond to outside influences.

This is particularly important in robotic research and application activities, with several Australian universities doing much work in this field.

Recent F/T sales have been for research in the movement and simulation of human ankles and we even have F/T enquiries for security applications.

Related equipment such as compliant force tools provide robots with the necessary 'touch and feel' for operations like robotic grinding, polishing, sanding and finishing, which were previously considered impractical.

In these tiring, highly labour-intensive and environmentally challenging applications, a human operator is relied upon to apply or reduce the contact pressure of the abrasive medium according to his tactile response, which leads to product and quality variations from operator to operator and job to job.

By applying compliant force technology, these processes can now be finely controlled and output increased as robots do not fatigue.

What about the future of robotics - where is it heading in design?

We see the future of robot/worker interaction as a definite future growth area, so much so that we recently secured an exclusive sales partner agreement with the Swiss firm, Neuronics AG, developer and manufacturer of the world's only industrial robot which is approved to work in direct neighbourhood to people without any additional protection.

Already this company has an impressive list of almost 200 installations worldwide within industry, research, service robotics and training applications, including:

• Handling of electronic chips at Texas Instruments and Intel.
• Agitation tests for product development at Unilever.
• Loading/unloading of machines with vision recognition at Schiess AG.
• Research in health care at Georgia Institute of Technology.