Speaker 0 00:00:03 Hello everyone. I like to walk into the robot nation podcast today. This is the podcast dedicated to advanced manufacturing, hackable equipment and the robotics and automation industry. We'll be covering trends and topics important to factory automation and robotics. And we'll be interviewing guests in our series of podcasts. We know that manufacturing is great. It brings all kinds of jobs into your community. And if you're good and motivated, you have a job for life. My name's Jim Beretta. And I'm your host. I'm also president of customer attraction, industrial marketing based out of Cambridge, Ontario. I'd like to thank and acknowledge our sponsor today, who was actually becoming a partner. The <inaudible> the association for advancing automation. A three is the umbrella association for the RIA AIA MCMA and <inaudible> three Mexico. These four associations combined represent almost 1300 automation manufacturers, component suppliers, systems integrators, and users, research groups, and consulting firms throughout the world that are driving automation forward our guests today.
Speaker 0 00:01:07 And we're very happy to have him is while Weaver from Earhart engineered solutions in granite city, Illinois, the Earhart company is a robot systems integrator and custom machine builder. And the company's been in business for over 80 years, while is a sales application engineer with Earhart. And whilst worked as an application engineer in several automation companies and has experienced working in automotive, pharmaceutical food processing, lab instrumentation and retail printing. So he's had a wide variety of synergistic technologies, which undoubtedly has given him a wide variety of product and process knowledge. Welcome to the webinar. And we're happy to have you. Thank you, Jim. And thanks for having me. Today's webinars of a common sense robotics and at Earhart you're experts in assembly automation and robotics and tooling. So while let's talk about some of the common sense in robotics for manufacturing, one of the first question always comes to mind, I think, is the return on investment for the robot?
Speaker 0 00:02:04 Like, why are we doing this again? Yeah. And that's certainly the, you know, the place and the foundation for any capital equipment project and certainly holds true for automation. You know, and the first thing is we look for when we get engaged with a customer is understanding the current process and what the expectations are, or the automation is key to understand the human interaction that's going to be required or expected upon completion of the automation project as well. You know, typical drivers of the return on investment that we see are, you know, reduce or eliminate ergonomic or safety issues. Uh, we have issues where you have reach issues, repetitive task issues, parts are too heavy for operator handling. Those sorts of things are the things we, you know, one of the things that certainly drives a robotics or automation process, Oh, another thing might be to reduce or eliminate manpower required for the production.
Speaker 0 00:03:09 We're trying to, trying to get more efficient and be more cost effective in today's economy, trying to be competitive. And you know, a third thing that we often talk about in, in return on investment is the consistency of quality results. Sometimes the need arises from quality issues, a bad part got off to an end customer. And, you know, typically in automotive, certainly in medical, these things can be very damaging, uh, financially. And also in some cases, you know, could be, you know, even more than that. So a fourth thing that we will often talk about is consistency in production, production rates, you know, the robot and the automation is going to be cycle after cycle the same. So you can rely on that and you don't have the inconsistencies that you might get with the human interaction. So all of these things are potential items we might look at or consider between us in a, you know, potential customer and understanding these, you know, the model that, you know, a particular customer is looking at how allows us to tailor a solution to, to their requirements.
Speaker 0 00:04:24 And then, you know, then there's the metrics that they can follow as well to identify, monitor, to verify the success of the project longterm. Yeah. It was interesting that you started off with safety and I think that two of the big motivators, they certainly are safety and quality for sure. So how do you decide, like why a robot and maybe not some other automated device? Well, there's several things to consider in that regard. One of the key things that I always comes into play for me, I think for a lot of customers is flexibility that the robot provides you versus sticks piece of automation that would fix a piece of automation. It's going to pick part a from point a and put it in point B, whereas with a robot, if something changes along the way in that process. And, and I now want to take that part and move it from point a to point B and then, Oh, also by the way, I've got a secondary operation.
Speaker 0 00:05:26 I need to add to this, you know, after the, you know, after the initial projects let's say was completed, now I have the flexibility via, you know, just simply the programming to make that change. Whereas my now my dedicated automation that I had made say in its very simplest form, moving a part from a to B you know, now I have to have some something else or I have to totally redesign what I initially had. Those sorts of things. Additionally, the also allows me to have accessories, like one of the most common ones would be vision inspection. So I can do some secondary inspection type things along the way incorporated into the robot, uh, that I would be much more difficult with a fixed piece of automation. You know, we kind of, I kind of touched on it, but programmability, uh, allowing adaptation to new requirements after the initial install with, you know, this process changes subtly and we need to make a change.
Speaker 0 00:06:30 If I have a fixed piece of automation, it may not be flexible enough to make that change. Uh, additionally, we may, and this is quite common in, especially in automotive would be, we've got new part models that we want to add into the mix. They're similar, it's a model change or something of that nature. If I've got a line full of fixed automation that could become a very intensive design and refit retrofit solution that could become very costly as opposed to a robust solution that may have, maybe I have to make some changes to end of arm tooling and things of that nature, but it's certainly less intensive than a fixed automation solution. Another thing that, you know, advantage that robot over fixed automation provide is the redeploy ability as a capital equipment asset. You know, you could take that, you know, this project runs its course in five or six years, let's say I still have a capital equipment asset that is that I can use in retrofit into another automation solution and still be reaping the benefits and the value of that, of that piece of equipment. I also think in general, your robot solution is going to be a less engineering development upfront required because of the standard robot configuration and the flexibility that it provides
Speaker 1 00:08:05 You very much for that. Well, I, I agree with you and I think two robots are a really good deal for manufacturers today. Uh, the price has been coming down on them. The performance is way up. So I don't know if that adds to the ROI question or not.
Speaker 0 00:08:19 I think it certainly does. I think, you know, obviously everyone is going to be looking at cost is a key driver in most, every decision when it comes to capital equipment. So, you know, it's certainly a factor and I, a hundred percent agree with you. The cost is becoming more and more attainable for you, you know, even smaller and job shop manufacturers.
Speaker 1 00:08:40 Um, what about the robot environment? Was there anything that you can tell us a little, tell the audience a little bit about maybe unusual situation?
Speaker 0 00:08:49 Yeah, there's certainly, uh, the robot environment that, uh, it's certainly something that needs to be considered every time. There are some certainly harsh environments that robots are deployed into, you know, Foundry being one of them, a main one, welding is, is a somewhat harsh environment. Plasma cutting is very, very harsh and all these things need to be considered in factored in to your decision. The manufacturers typically now have packages, Foundry packages that have hardened the robot for harsher environments like that. So those things are things that nowadays is a more commonplace on the other end of the spectrum. You see robots deployed a lot in clean room assembly type environments, and that certainly requires some specific design considerations as well. And most, most robot manufacturers these days have solutions for clean room environments as well. There may be also additional considerations you might want to think about or, or need to take into account, for example, unique cables and robot cables and utilities and things of that nature, uh, still are going to require some additional protection, uh, to avoid maintenance issues down the road.
Speaker 1 00:10:16 And there's lots of opportunities for people to put on things like dress packs and their robots. So the robot accessory market has come quite a ways in adding those two.
Speaker 0 00:10:26 Yes, absolutely. There's there are plenty of suppliers out there that have, uh, been re refining these things over the years. And, uh, so there's, there's plenty of opportunities. Yes. Like say she's in, uh, uh, various composites and components and, uh, to protect things from weld, spatter and debris from plasma cutting and just the nasty molten metals in the Foundry industry.
Speaker 1 00:10:54 Are you finding to a while that robots are becoming more specialized? Like you, you mentioned like welding robots that they're just very specialized to that task.
Speaker 0 00:11:05 Yeah, absolutely. There's certainly welding is a very, very big market and there's a lot of attention paid to that by all the robot suppliers, because it is so big and there's a lot of developments and in that process of come along and, and people have specialized and refined their accessories that go along with it, painting would be another example of something that's specialized market niche as well. You know, and then certainly the evolution of the collaborative robots have brought a whole new piece to the market.
Speaker 1 00:11:41 Absolutely. So one of the things that you do all day long, and I know, cause I used to be an applications engineer a long, long time ago, um, is you reduce risk, right? But on both sides, you know, you were reduce risk on behalf of Earhart, but you
Speaker 0 00:11:54 Also reduce risk on behalf of the customer. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, certainly we're looking at, we need to provide first and foremost a safe solution. So we can't, we can't put robots in place with, without doing a risk assessment, identifying the, the risks and taking proper precautions and putting things in place to mitigate or eliminate those risks, you know, RIA as risk assessment tools for us to use and those things for us, as well as end users as well have access to those sorts of things. So additionally, one of the things we look at as, you know, cycle time is a big, is a big deal. And if we, we aren't correct on the cycle time, you know, customer is not going to get their payback and you know, things aren't going to be good that way. So there's many software simulation packages that can tell us that we can model our concept, our layout, and we can determine, Hey, are our cycle time is, is accurate.
Speaker 0 00:13:07 And additionally, we can also verify that we're actually able to reach everything that we need to reach and make some particular moves of the robot that we need to make. Cause sometimes there's particular manipulations that you need to get to get to certain points. So simulation packages have come a lot. Software has come a long way. Uh, and there are a lot of tools out there to be able to eliminate some of those risks that can be just killers to projects. And we talked about building prototypes as a way of reducing risk. And is that something that you would recommend on maybe something that has high risk? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's doing some small, uh, a reduced level feasibility study on certain stations or particular aspects of a project that are high risk uncertain. Maybe you can't find any reference for this has been done or done in the way that you're looking to do it previously. Being able to take a portion of that and design and develop, whether it be tooling or kind of just working through and running a certain piece of the project allows us to understand a little bit better and takes away a lot of the problems we might run into in the debug phase of things, which is pretty late in the game. And oftentimes it's going to cost us a whole lot more money and time to fix than had we found it much earlier in the project,
Speaker 1 00:14:54 White for a certain station that you might, like you say is unproven, or maybe it's a dispense operation that has to be done in a certain way. If the client spends $20,000 with you, they might be able to save 20 or $30,000 because they've reduced that risk and it becomes cheaper.
Speaker 0 00:15:09 Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, I had a wise person once tell me that if you find the problem in engineering, it costs you $10 to fix it. If you call it, if you find it while you're building and debugging, it costs you a hundred. And if you don't find it until you have after you've installed the project, that will cost you a thousand to fix it. So, you know, and I think that I have seen over the years that, that, that sort of line of thinking holds true. Absolutely. You know, the other thing is like, let's say you have multiple fixtures or pallets that you're going to process with, you know, designing and developing and building one of those. Let's say, if you had 50 pallets, I might want to design and build the first one, make sure all the parts fit correctly and it's going to do what I need to do, you know, and make changes and tweak things and refine on one rather than getting them all together and making changes on 50.
Speaker 1 00:16:06 Yeah. Really good idea there. So one of the questions I was going to ask you too is, so what, what are you going to do with the robot and, and what are some of those process and precision?
Speaker 0 00:16:18 Yeah. So requirements we typically look at are what's the overall cycle time, you know, and production rates that you're looking for so that we can make sure that we get a robot that fits what you're trying to do. We certainly, you know, the other things are payload and, and reach requirements. Those things typically drive are the main drivers of the robot. Some times accuracy can come into play. If we've got a highly accurate assembly process we're trying to do, or, you know, something of that nature, you know, once you know that background and we can start to narrow our focus into the particular models that are in that payload and reach specification. So now you've got
Speaker 1 00:17:06 The background on how, where do you decide on a manufacturer for a robot? How does that usually work with Earhart and yourself?
Speaker 0 00:17:13 In a lot of cases, customers are coming to us. They may already have a plant full of, uh, a particular brand. So in that case, they are specifying to us that I want to use brand X, or they may not have that, but they do have a preference of some sort based on maybe some experience with another company or just a research they've done on their own, those sorts of things. I think in today's market, all of the main robot manufacturers are doing a good job with her, with their product and can provide products for, you know, some of the basic applications that we run into. So, you know, it really comes down to a preference and we certainly have our preferences as well, that we deal with more regularly, you know, and I think that's the key, you know, the reason people like, you know, want to continue with the robots that they have in places they're familiar with them, they know how to program them.
Speaker 0 00:18:13 They know how to maintain them. You know, they know how to make them work the best. So those things are all important. It's also important for us. And so given no direction from the customer, we'll drive it towards what, you know, what we're most familiar with from, you know, from there, then it's a matter of finding the robot that fits into beats, meets the needs of their application and fits into, you know, the budget that they're looking for. You certainly have, you know, other things you consider end of arm tooling and training and things of that nature, which may be training, especially may become more important if you know, customers new to automation, new to robotics, and don't have that capability built up just yet. And those are some really good points. I find sometimes that's where some manufacturers leave off, right. Is where is there a training and retraining of operators and skilled operators.
Speaker 0 00:19:08 So it's not a small issue. We could probably do a podcast just on that topic alone. Yeah, exactly. It is key, you know, regardless we are, we're going to support our customers, uh, to the best of our abilities, but in the end, the customer is there. If something goes wrong and their ability to recover as quickly as possible is going to be key to their ongoing success and, uh, us as a company and the success of the particular project. So yeah, it's very key to be, get formal training on it. I think it's one thing that a lot of places, a lot of companies in general, not just manufacturers and automation, purchasers do, but they shortchange on formal training, which is, uh, very beneficial in the long run for their company health. I think, I think you're right. I think as people move on and, and maybe do something else in the facility, you just need to have that second tier trained and it's just a constant good ongoing investment.
Speaker 0 00:20:14 So we talked about robot accessories and you mentioned vision as an accessory. What are some of your thoughts, you know, when we're looking at the common sense, part of robotics, what are some of your thoughts on that? I think today the vision is a, is one of the accessories that is very common in the robot manufacturers, uh, in general, all, all of the major manufacturers. Anyway, they've done a very good job over the years of refining their offerings for vision and two D vision, especially is very, very robust now, you know, after years of refinement and those interface packages and interfacing with the robot 3d vision is also becoming more and more common. And that will just only get better and better as the, as the years go by. Uh, the other thing, you know, most robots have a capability or a package offering of the common industrial communication and IO protocols that are on the market. And, you know, so that makes them very readily integrated into new and existing solutions that are able to meet the plant wide standards. Um, you know, I think there's also a growing number of supply companies that offer standard off the shelf end of arm tooling solutions, kind of generic solutions. Uh, you see a lot of that in vacuum type grippers, for instance.
Speaker 1 00:21:56 Sure. You remember back in the day when you couldn't just go buy an off the shelf end of arm tool, you actually had to design it. You actually had to build it. And these are crazy things now that you'd think about, right. Although there's still a lot being made custom.
Speaker 0 00:22:11 Yeah. Certainly there's always, always going to be a case for you. Can't find exactly what you need off the shelf, or it doesn't work quite for everything that you need. So you're always going to have a custom component to it, but yes, there are far more than previously and being able to go buy something off the shelf just provides a wealth of good things for the customer and being able to put, put a spare on the shelf and, you know, if something were to happen, um, you know, it cuts down on design costs and you know, all those sorts of things.
Speaker 1 00:22:48 Absolutely. So I love this question and out about some of the mistakes. So what are some of the mistakes that when it comes to kind of common sense robotics, or what are some of the mistakes that you've seen in your, uh, in your automation life?
Speaker 0 00:23:00 Yeah. This one might be, might have enough content for a separate podcast as well, but, but we'll, we'll keep it short. So I think, you know, certainly one of the things that often, uh, mistakes are made with is the robot performance data. You look at payload speeds, acceleration and all those sort of things factored in and really need to understand how that data is calculated, especially payload in recognizing how, how they're determining what that max payload is. And it's, uh, you know, typically a relatively small offset from the risk access flange is, is where that center of gravity point is to define your max payload. And so there's a lot, you know, many times mistakes made not considering that in the big problem you can have is you get a big offset, then you're payloads in your speeds are going to be derated. So if you've, if you're needing that full payload and full speed or acceleration capability, and you've got this big offset load on your end of arm tooling, then those things have all been derated and you're not going to achieve your results.
Speaker 0 00:24:17 You know, another thing kind of somewhat related to that, I guess, is it's not properly accounting for the way to the end of arm tool in your payload calculation. You know, people say, Oh, I got parked. It's 10 pounds. I can use this easily, use this 10 kilogram payload robot. Well, you certainly have to account for the fact of end of arm. Tooling can easily weigh 10 to 15 pounds. Now you're above the payload capacity, that robot, when you consider the tooling and the part together, and another thing you often see is the envelope of the robot. And when you look at it from a plan view, you see a large radius circle, but when you look at it in the elevation, that envelope is not uniform it's, there's a, there's a point out in front of the robot where it's the furthest outreach. And then as you go up and as you go down towards the floor, that envelope, uh, reduces.
Speaker 0 00:25:20 So you need to really consider all of those things and your access of, or, you know, how you, how the robot axes are going to be oriented when you're reaching the point where your things are, where the robot is doing its work. Uh, the other thing I think people miss sometimes, and this can affect their cycle time calculations is, you know, I can't just necessarily go straight to a point. I might have to come over and approach the point from above and then slowly go down to the point, depending on how tight those. So say I'm loading apart into a fixture. If I'm bringing that part over, I, if it's a very close fit, I may have to go very slowly into that set down point another issue we often we're seeing more and more now arising is a big push and a lot of companies, these are wanting to install a collaborative robot just for the sake of, because it's the newest technology.
Speaker 0 00:26:28 So you heard this from, from customers that, Hey, my boss says, I need to put a collaborative robot in there, not caring, whether it really is doing anything for them. They just want to have one because it's the newest, latest and greatest. And I think just thing to realize there is, you know, one of the things that makes collaborative robot technology work is you may not always get the speed that you're looking for to do a particular application. So you really need to make sure that if this is a high, higher speed application, you really need to make sure that the speeds of the robot are going to be such, that it meets the needs that you have, that you're going to have. So those are some of the you off the top, the top of my top five, I guess at this point, certainly we could, we could add more to that if we had had more time.
Speaker 0 00:27:19 I think that, that, that would be fun. We'll look forward to doing that in this series of how to automate. So we talked about ROI, how important is the after you've installed the machine, how important is service and support? Well, I think it's very key and I think most robot manufacturers these days, as well as Earhart have around the clock support. So if you've got a robot issue, you're going to be able to get, get ahold of somebody and talk to somebody 24 seven. You know, you've got a significant investment and it's not making you money if you can't keep it up and running. So one thing I think customers need to pay attention to is pay attention to the preventative maintenance, send your maintenance folks and get them trained on, on how to maintain the robot. What are the key things? And then follow the manufacturer's recommended guidelines for those things.
Speaker 0 00:28:16 You know, it's much like my car or our cars. If we don't take them to get an oil change on a, on a regular basis, they're not going to last nearly as long as, as they could. And if we go out and run them, run them as fast as they can, every trip we make, they're going to wear out faster. So if we don't need to accelerate at a hundred percent decelerate at a hundred percent and move as fast as we can, we should move as fast as we need to. And that will say, wear and tear on the robots as well. And again, I think as we've touched on before, I think the training in this aspect is key. And then also finding integrators so much like Earhart that will support you after the, after the install, our job doesn't end as an integrator, once we've installed and you start it up, you know, our job is to help you, help you be productive throughout the life cycle of that particular project.
Speaker 0 00:29:23 I think that that would be a good topic for another podcast. Hey, well, I'd like to thank you for taking time out of your day to chat with our audience. And, um, how can people get in touch with you? Well, you can reach me via email at L Weaver. That's L w E a V E R at Earhart solutions. That's E H R H a R D T S O L U T I O N s.com
[email protected]. You can certainly reach me by phone at (937) 703-5246. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, if that's a good option for you as well. Thanks again. And I'd like to thank our production team for Janet and Chris, uh, painted robot technology partner and Chris gray for our ultra music. And of course, uh, our partner B a three association, the RIA MCMA and the AIA. And if you liked this podcast, please rate us wherever you find your podcasts, but more importantly, tell your friends, send them an email, tweet us. Our hashtag is robot nation podcast. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, our email address is robot nation
[email protected]. And if you have an idea, an interesting company or technology, or would like to be a guest or nominate someone to be a guest, please send me an email outside of the robot nation podcast, Gmail address. And so we'll see you next time. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 2 00:31:05 <inaudible>.
