PARTNER CONTENT
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
increasing wage pressures from lower-cost countries, we needed to find a way to mitigate our non-value-added costs. This would help us maintain the competitiveness that our global clients and the companies we want to work with expect from us. Consequently, in 2018, we began developing our own internal automation team and expertise, making significant investments in this group. We now have four dedicated manufacturing engineers, along with a maintenance manager who brings three decades of experience with automation platforms. Notably, we handle all of our design work in-house, including the development of End of Arm Tooling( EOAT) for the overhead Cartesian robots on our machines.
“ We have implemented a fleet of Universal Robots( URs) as a collaborative robotics platform on our floor. These robots function like articulated arms, allowing us to design, build, and attach custom end-effectors to perform various tasks. In our case, we have programmed these URs to execute functions like placing inserts onto a shuttle. These inserts are then picked up by the EOAT and loaded into the injection molding tool for overmolding metal inserts, where fasteners will be integrated in other processes downstream from us. In some applications, we use vision systems attached to the ends of the URs to take measurements and do presence sensing, which serves as a quality assurance check. On top of that, we have also implemented vision system checks at various locations within our facility. For instance, we have systems integrated into safety cages that surround the automation, where parts picked by the EOAT are presented to the vision system. This setup also allows for
86