Guide to maintaining machines with robots

What is machine maintenance?

Manufacturing depends on machinery, and the continued profitability of a manufacturing business depends on those machines maintaining high levels of performance over time. An important part of this is increasing the utilization and efficiency of existing equipment. Loading and unloading materials from industrial machines at consistent rates increases productivity and yields – lowering production costs over time. This is what we mean by machine maintenance.

For decades, this physically demanding job has been performed by machine operators. But as skilled workers have become harder to find, machine maintenance has become one of the most popular manufacturing processes to automate. The workflow of placing raw parts or blanks into one machine part and removing them after the mechanical process is complete can be automated to ensure there is no variation.

How our cobot can help

Cobot arms are great at picking things up and putting them down, which is basically machine maintenance in its simplest form. But within that broad definition, there is a great deal of variation and complexity between different machine maintenance applications. That’s where the versatility of the cobot can really add value. They integrate seamlessly with a variety of end effectors, vision systems, and other accessories, eliminating complexity for the user. A compact footprint and flexible, easy-to-use software can quickly add value to a manufacturing workflow.