Page 36 - MetalForming May 2017

Robots on Wheels
do,” says Bush. “When the staff arrives in the morning, we’ll have work orders printed for employees to wheel the robots over to the tasks at hand that day.”
The collaborative robots have improved production effi- ciency by 20 percent, according to Bush, while taking over monotonous and potentially hazardous tasks. Displaced employees now are reallocated to more rewarding jobs in other production areas where the company has seen growth, or to fill holes due to natural attrition. With the productivity rise, SFEG is experiencing a 12 to 14-month return on invest- ment per robot.
“We’re seeing about one-to-one movement of people from where we put in a robot,” says Rob Goldiez, SFEG gen- eral manager. “We have 14 robots from Universal Robots, and as we implement those, we expect to be able to reposition 14 employees. It allows us to be much more flexible as a manufacturer.”
Robot success stories abound at SFEG, with the units performing a wide variety of jobs. Again, as SFEG looks for tasks to automate, eliminating monotonous and potentially dangerous manual labor is the number-one priority.
For example, two robots work on the motor-field line, a UR5 and a UR10. The UR5 robot is placed at the end of the line next to an employee that hands the robot a motor-field part. The UR5 picks the part and places it in a holder, picks up a wirecutter to trim the wires, and then places the part
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The first collaborative robot arriving at SFEG, with 5-kg load capacity, was named Waldo, inspired by the popular “Where’s Waldo” books featuring a friendly fellow that keeps appearing in new places amongst crowds of people. The name speaks to how SFEG associates view its mobility and flexibility in performing tasks.
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