Collaborative automation

The rise of collaborative automation has been one of the most important trends in industrial automation during the past decade, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Collaborative, lightweight industrial robots, and associated end-effectors and software solutions have upended industrial automation paradigms by making safe, effective automation available to SMEs without the cost and complexity generally associated with deployment.

Today, SMEs can deploy automation on a diverse range of tasks – from dispensing, assembly, and pick & place to machine tending, material handling, and packaging & palletizing. Lower capital expenditure requirements and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) make collaborative automation a feasible proposition, even for a small company with few employees.

Additionally, since collaborative automation is much easier to program than traditional systems, these solutions are faster to deploy, reducing downtime costs regardless of the user’s previous level of robotics experience.

This has been a boon for SMEs, but until recently, there’s been a missing piece in the collaborative automation marketplace, particularly when it comes to leveraging the power of digital tools.

The hidden smart factory

Collaborative automation creates data from the tip of your end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) to the base of your collaborative robot (cobot) arm. If you can get to this data and process it, you can make data-driven decisions that boost productivity, slash downtime, and quickly resolve bottlenecks.

Unfortunately, most of that data is hidden, meaning there’s a hidden smart factory in your collaborative automation cell that’s not being leveraged. This hidden production potential, caused by a lack of suitable digitalization tools, means SMEs haven’t been able to get the most out of their collaborative automation.

Production monitoring is an important element of the digitalization wave that’s sweeping the industrial sector, especially among larger companies. And, despite considerable interest in digitalization among SMEs, traditional production monitoring software solutions have proven too costly and complicated to be feasible.

Until now.

Smart factory tech for SMEs

The recent emergence of WebLytics – a SME-friendly production monitoring, device diagnostics, and data analytics software solution – has empowered SMEs to turn their collaborative automation cells into smart factories.

Capable of monitoring the performance of multiple collaborative applications simultaneously in real-time, WebLytics gathers equipment data from robots and tools, transforming it into easy-to-understand, visualized device and application-level intelligence.

Specially designed for use on collaborative applications and suited to deployments in small shops and factories, it empowers SMEs to make smart, data-driven decisions. Additionally, as an easy gateway to digitalization, WebLytics empowers SMEs to introduce smart factory technology without all the traditional costs and complexity.

It eliminates manual data collection while providing actionable insights into how well a collaborative application is performing, offering live device diagnostics, alerts, and preventive maintenance measures to keep costly robot cell downtime to a minimum.

Integrating the globally recognized overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) industry standard, WebLytics identifies trends in the cell in real-time, including patterns, peaks, and disturbances in application productivity.

OEE measures the percentage of manufacturing time that’s truly productive – a score of 100% indicates the collaborative application is producing only good parts, as fast as possible, and with no downtime.

Accessible on any device through its secure, intuitive browser-based user interface, WebLytics displays OEE measures and user-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) via easy to read, customizable dashboards. This provides users with an immediate and transparent view into the real-time and historical performance of their collaborative automation.

Pioneering application focus

SMEs are application focused, so they require production monitoring software designed for use with collaborative automation and focused on the specific application being performed.

WebLytics is an example of this new breed of specialist production monitoring software. It’s easy to use, provides seamless compatibility with collaborative hardware and software, and provides transparent, real-time insight into how collaborative automation is performing the application.

The OEE-focused production monitoring software is specifically designed for collaborative applications and is fully compatible with leading collaborative and light industrial robot brands including the OnRobot ecosystem of tools and components. And it allows users to define their own KPIs.

Granular insight into application performance

Need to find out how many grip cycles have been performed or how many safety stops have been initiated during an application? Is your application running at optimal speed? WebLytics provides that information and OEE insights, including the number of completed cycles and measures of the automation’s availability, its performance, and quality of its work.

This enables users to better understand and optimize their collaborative cell’s performance throughout time.

By identifying trends in real-time in the robot cell, including patterns, peaks, and disturbances in application productivity, WebLytics enables SMEs to identify problems that negatively impact productivity while empowering continuous process improvements. It can send immediate alerts if there’s an issue with the automation and lets users track and plan maintenance so they can keep their facilities running effectively.

Over time, data collected by WebLytics provides granular insights that can inform business decisions around product pricing, growth opportunities, and new business initiatives.

Plus, by enabling users to compare performance at different points in time, WebLytics makes it easy to compare performance whenever changes are made to a robot cell, such as adjusting a robot’s speed or the settings on a gripper.

Completing the jigsaw

Collaborative automation made industrial automation technologically and financially feasible for SMEs, but digitalization remained beyond the budgets and in-house expertise of most small companies. Now, new software can provide SMEs with a suite of tools for production monitoring and data analysis, enabling them to transform their collaborative cells into smart factories, digitalized and ready to fully embrace the benefits of Industry 4.0.

About the author: Kristian Hulgard is general manager, Americas Division, at OnRobot and can be reached at kristian.hulgard@onrobot.com.

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