New developments and innovations are having an impact on the assembly line, the plant floor, and for the workers.
Far from Silicon Valley and even farther away from Asia’s electronics hub, a little startup with a lot of soul is making waves. At the eastern tip of Lake Erie, a company started by Danish immigrants is building mobile computers in, of all places, downtown Buffalo.
At Bak USA, five technicians sit at a half moon-shaped workstation building laptops and tablets from scratch. Just an arm’s length away, a screwdriver-toting robot collaborates on the assembly. You have a three-year-old startup, with 100 employees, and one robot. What are the odds? With the advent of human-robot collaboration (HRC), the odds are growing. Small and medium-sized enterprises are taking note of its potential.
This is not a run-of-the-mill company. The Bak family’s vision is to make mobile technologies accessible to every human being on Earth. While ambitious, this startup is charting its path one community at a time with a millennial brand of social responsibility. Add in some heavyweight partners including Microsoft, Intel, and Esri, and you have something quite formidable.
Bak USA builds 2-in-1 laptops for K-12 classrooms with the belief every student has the right to high-tech learning opportunities. They also make rugged tablets for the everyday worker, whether they are in the factory, on a construction site, or our men and women in blue.
All the while, Bak USA believes in taking care of their own "working class." A people-centric business model means they put their employees first.
So what does an unconventional company do to rock the boat? They adopt a robot. Not only their first robot, but their first piece of serious automation on the production floor. And not just any robot. A robot free of the safety "cages" typically associated with traditional industrial robots. Disruptive technology times two.
Cobot campaign
This was a new frontier for Bak USA. They had always put people first. Now they were introducing a robot to their ranks. It turns out they had some help sowing the launch.
Buffalo Manufacturing Works is an engineering consulting organization established by a New York state development initiative. Bak USA brought them onboard to help the startup evaluate their production processes for out-of-the-box solutions.
And boy, did they go outside the box.
"Nothing was off the table," said Matt Malloy, director of advanced manufacturing at Bak USA. "We looked at everything from an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) that would drive parts around, to flying drones through the building that would drop off parts."
Buffalo Manufacturing Works introduced the idea of a collaborative robot (cobot) to Bak USA.
"We looked at everything we do as a business and said, where can we have the biggest impact?" Malloy explained. "We had the luxury of a leadership team that was very much in favor of saying we are new in the industry, we want to make an impact, we want to do right by everyone who works here, we want to make people’s jobs exciting and interesting and comfortable, so we’re willing to explore. It’s the benefit of a company that is very strongly behind what it wants to do technically and socially."
Bak USA’s social mission is behind everything they do. They wanted to relieve their technicians from an ergonomically challenging task while increasing production efficiency so they can continue making high-quality, affordable electronics for young students and the workforce.
"If you can imagine working with tiny, mobile device-sized screws all day," Malloy said, "trying to hold them with your fingertips and get them on the tip of a screwdriver, and put them in and get the right torque. It’s a difficult part of the process."
The Kawasaki duAro dual-arm SCARA robot was deployed to ease the workload. After a few months of testing, the system is now in full production.The production process involves technicians seated around the robot in a semicircle. Each technician builds a computer device from start to finish at his or her own station. When the device is ready for screws, the technician initiates a quick process that shuttles the device to the robot. The robot inserts the screws and drives them in, and then the device is shuttled back to the technician for additional assembly if needed.
Since there may be five technicians feeding devices to the robot at any given time, if the robot is busy installing screws in one device, the other device waits in the queue. Meanwhile, the technician can be building the next device.
Each arm on the duARo is equipped with a vision camera and a torque-feedback electric screwdriver. The machine vision is used to confirm placement of the screws in the assembly. It also helps determine which screw sizes to use for different devices. A screw feeder presents the screws to the robot.
While the robot is faster than a human performing the same operation, Malloy said that’s not the key consideration.
"More importantly, it’s taking away a step that nobody building the device wants to do."
Bak USA looked at other collaborative robotic systems but they chose the duAro for its precision, compact size, and inherent safety, among other considerations.
"The duAro was a good fit because of how it moves. It’s a two-arm cobot, which makes it really nice," Malloy said. "You can work on two devices at once or run it in various ways. The controls and the sensors and the feedback on the system are great. And the system itself is padded, so even if it does bump into you, it’s like a cushion hitting you."
People first, safety first
The duAro robot was designed with the harmonized ISO 10218 and ANSI/RIA 15.06 robot safety standards in mind for collaborative operation says Samir Patel, director of product and advanced engineering for Kawasaki Robotics (USA), Inc. in Wixom, Mich.
"For the highest level of safety," Patel said, "Kawasaki has a hardware and software package called Cubic-S, which monitors the workspace and speed of each arm."
Low-power motors, less than 80 W according to Patel, coupled with a soft-cushioned body and speed, force, and work zone monitoring enable the duAro to collaborate safely with humans. A collision detection function instantaneously stops the robot’s movement in the unlikely event of a collision.
Bak USA had initial concerns about safety, mostly because of the newness of the technology. So they worked with external companies to help assess safety, as well as provide training courses for their workforce. Malloy said they probably went overboard in terms of safety.
"For now, just to be extra safe, we have light curtains in front of every workstation. We have safety mats behind each tool, so no one can walk near it, even though it is a collaborative robot. We have dual touchpoints for safety control, so nobody can load or unload a device with their hands in the way."
If someone or something does breach the light curtain or trigger the safety mat, the robot comes to an immediate stop.
"Buffalo Manufacturing Works has been able to develop the system for us in such a way that it’s so fast to reset," Malloy said. "In my experience, whenever interlocks or those types of things were triggered, it was always a complicated process to get it back to an operational state. Here, they’ve put so much thought into making it safe and easy to use, and easy to troubleshoot."
Ease of use is a common theme we hear with cobots. For many, "teaching" has replaced programming.
Easy to teach
Kawasaki provides three options for programing the duAro. The lead-through-teach function allows a person to grab one of the robot’s arms and physically move it to the desired point, and then record the point on a programming tablet. You repeat these steps for each point to teach a complete path.
The second method involves using an Android tablet, which wirelessly connects to the duAro robot controller, to jog the robot in joint, base, or tool coordinates. The third method is for advanced users to program complex applications.
After experiencing how intuitive the lead-through-teach feature is, Malloy said he can’t imagine having to teach a robot with a teach pendant, which is how most traditional industrial robots are programmed.
An advantage of the duAro is the two arms can be taught to work independently performing different tasks, or their movements can be coordinated to perform a task.
Kawasaki’s Patel provides examples common in electronics manufacturing. "In many electronics assembly applications, it’s necessary to fixture the parent part for precise positioning before assembly. With the duAro, one arm can hold the parent part in position while the other arm does the assembly application, like screw fastening or gluing."
The arms also can coordinate to carry a larger load, such as a printed circuit board. With the robot’s coaxial design, the two arms share a common axis, Joint 1, so they can rotate from the front to the back of the robot. Each arm can handle a payload of 2 kg. Coordinating, they can carry 4 kg. Bak USA uses the dual-arm functions independently or in a coordinated fashion, depending on their production requirements.
Preparing the workforce for cobots
Contributing to Bak USA’s successful adoption of cobots was early involvement by their workforce. Before even starting the project, they got their technician team involved.
"We worked closely with Buffalo Manufacturing Works and we had them work with our technicians to understand our process and what works and what doesn’t," Malloy said. "We did field some of the typical questions, like why add a robot and what does this mean for my job? But we kept everybody in the loop throughout the whole process. We had multiple occasions to get them involved, even if it’s as simple as having people take pictures with the cobot. By the time it got here, people were excited. The first day they were using it, people were asking, when is the next one coming? You can’t even imagine the smiles on people’s faces the first time we all saw this thing running and the five people that were thrilled they were the ones doing it."
The unveiling was indeed a company-wide celebration. The program has been so successful Bak USA has two more robots on order.
"The first day we had it in production it exceeded our expectations," Malloy said. "Then we were very quickly breaking records internally. We’re in the process of commissioning our second and third system right now."
Bak USA has nearly doubled in size over the last 12 months, adding 48 new jobs. The two additional robots will increase the number of technicians using the systems.
"We have a lot more people on the manufacturing floor," Malloy said. "We have enough people now to run all three systems. And we’re still hiring."
The future of co-automation
Bak USA plans to spend some time improving current systems. Malloy said they have learned a lot from this process, especially what they can add to the system or change to make it better.
"When we started it was just by hand. There was no co-automation. Now we’re rethinking how we design our products to take into account those design for automation features," he said.
One of Bak USA’s biggest challenges, Malloy said, wasn’t something big.
"Some of the seemingly more trivial things like trying to keep a very small screw on the end of a screwdriver bit while it’s moving, that has proven to be one of the most challenging things for us."
The biggest lesson Bak USA learned?
"Nowadays, everyone is saying if jobs aren’t somewhere else, then they are being taken away by robots," Malloy said. "We wanted to prove that doesn’t have to be the case. We want to show the industry that this can be done in a way that allows you to add automation and also create jobs at the same time, and make a good work environment. The biggest positive lesson learned isn’t even the technology, it’s the fact that we proved to ourselves that you can do that."
Cases like Bak USA’s prove it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Automation and people can coexist. Humans and robots can work together safely as coworkers and as collaborators.
Co-automation is also moving into automotive final assembly, an area that’s typically manual. Using a FANUC CR-35iA cobot (pictured), with its 35-kg payload capacity, Esys Automation developed a collaborative robotic system that applies urethane to automotive rear quarter glass.
The customer required the consistent quality of robotic urethane application, but lacked sufficient floor space for an enclosed cell with traditional safety guarding between the operator and robot. Esys was able to reduce the footprint by half and create a process where the operator works hand-in-hand with the cobot.
These robots are all collaborative power and force-limiting robots (PFLRs). These types of specialty industrial robots have inherent limits on their speed, the forces they can exert, and the payloads they can handle. In most cases, these robots can work in proximity or directly with humans without the need for safety fencing or other peripheral safety devices.
Human-robot collaboration, however, is not reserved for PFLRs. High-payload and high-speed robots can get in on the action. It does require some out-of-the-box thinking, though.
Tanya M. Anandan is contributing editor for the Robotic Industries Association (RIA) and Robotics Online. RIA is a not-for-profit trade association dedicated to improving the regional, national, and global competitiveness of the North American manufacturing and service sectors through robotics and related automation. This article originally appeared on the RIA website. The RIA is a part of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), a CFE Media content partner. Edited by Chris Vavra, production editor, Control Engineering, CFE Media, [email protected].
