ENABLING MANUFACTURING FLEXIBILITY: THE VEO FREEMOVE

Veo Robotics’ FreeMoveTM system makes close collaboration between humans and industrial robots possible. The system introduces safe and flexible manufacturing processes that reduce production and retooling costs, while granting manufacturers the ability to respond to all kinds of demand fluctuations. Alberto Moel, vice president strategy and partnerships at Veo Robotics explains.

At Veo Robotics, our fundamental assertion is that full-on automation is inflexible and fragile, and that high levels of automation can be terribly uneconomic. Conversely, an all-human manufacturing approach is also suboptimal under many reasonable conditions—the best outcome is a mix of humans and machines safely working together. The underlying economic reason is that combining the complementary strengths of humans and machines gives the entire system valuable flexibility to respond to changing conditions and uncertainty. If a manufacturing process is fully flexible, it is easy to quickly ramp production up or down depending on demand, and that adjustment can be done without expense so that unit economics are not affected. If, on the other hand, the process is inflexible, adjusting production volumes up or down will entail costly fixturing and reprogramming, and unit economics will be negatively affected. The takeaway from all of this is that production flexibility has value, and its value is highest when process requirements are uncertain, and lowest when they are certain. The need for flexibility is increasing as product variability increases and production runs get shorter. And as humans are infinitely flexible, one of the easiest ways to incorporate flexibility is to add more (not less) human input into the manufacturing process. Building flexibility into production processes by making them safe for human and machine collaboration is almost always going to be the most cost-effective choice.

Using tools like the Veo FreeMoveTM system, manufacturers will be able to automate the tasks that are most efficiently done by machines while retaining the flexibility of human workers to safely manage tasks that require adaptability, dexterity, and judgment. Essentially, FreeMoveTM provides many of the benefits of fully automated and fully manual approaches, without many of the costs each of those approaches entail. The Veo FreeMoveTM system provides three very specific and quantifiable sources of value:

Lower overall workcell design and time costs, and lower overall capex, with the side benefit of faster and lower cost reconfiguration and redesign;

Faster fault recovery;

New forms of working and human-machine collaboration not possible before, such as dual fixturing or in-cycle human-machine interaction.

LOWER WORKCELL CAPEX AND LOWER DESIGN AND TIME COSTS

In collaboration with Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) and a major manufacturer of consumer-packaged goods, we developed detailed models of four palletising alternatives: a fully manual approach, a fully automated approach, a PFL robot-based palletiser, and the Veo FreeMoveTM solution.

After examining the capital expenditures and commissioning metrics required to get the four different palletising solutions up and running, we concluded that the Veo solution is 40 per cent less expensive to install than the other automated solutions, while retaining a short process cycle time, a much shorter payback time, and quicker design, development, and implementation times. The speed and lower costs of the FreeMoveTM solution also had benefits when it came to reconfiguring the palletising workcells.

FASTER FAULT RECOVERY

We looked at the impact the frequency and duration of faults have on per-unit economics in this palletising case study. When a fault occurs with a traditional fully automated palletiser, the workers monitoring the system must complete a series of steps that could take over 10 minutes. First the workers must stop the system, then they must find the person with the key, open the door of the robot’s cage, reset the fault, exit the cage, verify that no one is in the cage, lock the door, write the fault up in the logbook, and then restart the system. With the Veo solution, the robot is not caged and human workers can quickly and safely step in to correct faults in just a couple of minutes. Quicker fault recovery enables some serious savings both in regards to per-pallet costs and overall factory throughput. Because both the fully automated palletiser and the Veo palletiser are “driven” off the same robot palletiser arm and therefore produce the same throughput, we can see the stark impact shorter or longer fault recovery times have on productivity.

Every time the palletiser is down, it becomes a bottleneck for the rest of the system. Assuming a 10-minute fault recovery time for the fully automated palletiser, the decline in number of pallets per shift as a function of faults per hour is quite steep. That lost throughput could result in a big revenue loss. On the other hand, assuming a one-minute fault recovery time with the Veo solution, although the number of pallets per shift necessarily declines as the number of faults per hour increases, the lost throughput is minimal.

NEW FORMS OF WORKING AND HUMANMACHINE COLLABORATION

When humans and high-speed and payload robots are able to work in close proximity, they can complete tasks in parallel that would otherwise need to be done in isolation, improving the efficiency of production lines. For example, in our palletising case study, humans handle some of the tasks the robot palletiser cannot, such as installing bumpers. This in-cycle human-machine interaction saves design time and effort, and the elimination of a needlessly-complicated $175,000 custom piece of machinery whose sole purpose is to put bumpers on pallet corners. Currently, commercial state-of-the-art safety systems do not allow for this kind of safe human-robot interaction. The Veo FreeMoveTM solution, once certified and widely available, will introduce flexibility in manufacturing processes and reduce costs across the board, while granting manufacturers the ability to respond to all kinds of demand fluctuations. Close collaboration between humans and machines will define the future of the manufacturing industry.

MV