[00:00:00] Speaker A: We paid a lot of attention to make sure the cells actually lock together and they're not just being, being roughly placed in place, so they already integrate very tightly and so they become very rigid machine, but they also come easily apart again. So. Yes, exactly. That's our goal. That's what we're doing.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Robot Industry Podcast. I'm Jim Beretta, I'm your host. Thanks. Thank you for subscribing. And I'm really excited today because I've got an old friend who's joining me, Conrad Knerth from Conexio Automation, and he happens to be in London, Ontario as well. Welcome to the podcast, Conrad.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Thanks, Jim. Thank you very much. Great to be here. We finally got a chance to do this, so I'm excited about it too.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Can you take a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to the audience so they kind of know who they're talking with or who they're listening to?
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. My name is Konrad Konov. I'm the owner, founder, owner and CEO of Conexio Connection. Started about 21 years ago and it's in the advanced automation and we're here at luckyhawk here in London, Ontario.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: This goes back to a long time when I would look at competitors to ATS Automation and I'd go, hey, there's a guy in London. I should really check this out. And you came from a precision automation background first. So precision indexing dials, which I'm sure everybody listening knows what that is, but just in case, can you give us a little bit of background on that?
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely, for sure. Yeah. I've been in the industry for quite a long time. I was actually working for a German company. They're welding cam driven indexing machines. These were really sophisticated, almost like sewing machines running all pretty much mechanically. Very, very high performance, very high accuracy, but also a little bit rigid, to be quite honest. So my work basically started here in Canada when I was brought over here from them to, to help them on the technical sales. Being young and I had worked with them for a few years in designing those machines. I was very, very excited and I thought this is the best product ever that they had. And I really liked their product and I came over here to sell it. We found that, yes, we had some good success, but not a lot of it. It was very hard to sell these because they were so specialized, they were so specific to a different industry that not everyone could use them. And that's when my frustration started to grow and I kind of sensed it over Time because I've been here like came in 94 and probably about five, six years later I kind of found that something not quite going right the way we hope it would be so and I remember distinctively I was down at the customers in Michigan actually. We saw this customer and I was really excited. It was a large customer that we hope we could make some inroads with but it just didn't fit. It just was not the product for them. We would love to be able to do something for them, but it just wasn't the right fit. And that's kind of where it dawned on me. So something had to be a little bit differently.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: And so from a high level, what's going on in automation from your perspective?
[00:03:00] Speaker A: So what I've seen lately in a high level specifically that things have changing now. There's a lot of industries are showing interest now that before never really were thinking about automation. So that's kind of really interesting. And especially during the pandemic I found there were a lot of people were all interested in automation. Can we do things differently? Of course there's always the realization cycle then and there when people realize it's not quite as simple, it's not quite as easy, it's not quite as cheap. But now we, now five years later we're finding that now people coming back to us and saying it's okay, we're more realistic now of our expectation. Some of these projects now that we probably started many years ago now starting to become more concrete and start to be realized on the other side. Of course we also know that the current situation is a little bit unpredictable for different reasons, both on the sales side of it and on the purchasing side. So we still don't quite know exactly the costing side of it, the delivery side of it. So all these things are a little bit unknown. So there's a little bit of a kind of a hold back right now at the moment. But a lot of the people are still knowing that and telling us that ultimately automation is the way forward for them to increase productivity. So I think we're in a good space to be in the long term. Just the short term is a little bit unknown and a lot of people waiting right now on the sidelines to make a decision. And we're seeing that a lot right now.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: You know, past the pandemic we kind of thought supply chain wow was really important, but it's actually become more important in the, in the short term and probably in the long term.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: So you've also been busy in innovation, both outside your company and inside your company. And you've developed a product like a chassis called Adapto. And I wonder if you could tell our audience a little bit more about Adapto and where it works and how it works.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I would love to. Yeah. So, so when I, after I kind of had this situation with my previous company with those cam driven machines, I realized a few things, what the limitations were. And so one was the limiting size and weight handling. They were very specific to a certain area, they were very limited on variations, they couldn't handle different variations.
So the changeover part was very hard for them to accomplish and it was very hard to do upgrades. Now that of course wasn't right away visible right in the beginning, but we found as we then started Connect zero and in the early years, of course you don't have a big customer base, so we serviced a lot of the Oku customer base and we did a lot of upgrades on existing machines.
And those upgrades, I tell you, they were really, really hard work. We had to go out and we were sometimes. Actually I remember one job, we were in the UK doing an upgrade job for six weeks we were there.
Now that was actually pretty good because the company itself, they actually quoted like three months. So we were actually pretty ahead of it. But it was very, very hard. It was hard work and we thought there must be a better way how to do that. And so with that focus we basically spent quite a long time, a few years to really develop a different kind of a platform. So what we came up with basically was we think we needed a system that is purely cell based.
So it's process focused instead of product focused. So what we mean by that is we want to split up every product into different processes and then pretty much build its own machine for every process.
And then we link them together. So once they become linked together they look like every any other assembly machine, you know, have all these different systems in there, all this. But it technically you can divvy them up and make them all work individually. The next big important part for us was to have a programmable indexing system.
So you know, of course a lot of companies, they're building on palletized systems or on camp or rotary tables or they, you know, a lot, of course nowadays you see a lot of these electrical systems to the magnetic system to drive through. We wanted something that actually is can be built just for each cell individually and then hand them over from cell to cell. That was very crucial to us. That makes it really flexible and much more Adaptable to what we wanted it to be. We also focused a lot on making these sub assemblies configurable. Meaning that I can actually, we can actually handle product sizes from a small product, let's say on a 160 by 160 style Bosch pallet of that kind of a size. We've done up to projects 2 x 3ft and 30 kg in pallet size, all with the same basic components. Again, they're configurable obviously, but they're the base same technology.
So what we can handle in different part variations and speeds and functions is nobody can copy that. We, of course we wanted to make sure we're building a system that's pre injected and tested. Now that comes back from my background from that German company. They believe very much in having a solid base system that actually is pre engineered, that's actually out there tested. And you just do the tooling for each application. But you don't work on the principles of the machine. The principle of the machine should be given to you and should be ready. And so all of this basically is combined and at the last big aspect for us is basically integrated controls. We want to make each cell a smart cell, meaning that each cell has all the functionality built in, has all the controls built in already from the get go. We don't have to custom build those things. For example, the index that are picking places all the different components, they're built on top of each other, but they also already the programming is already built in. So they technically become a robot. They are a robot basically by itself. Except they don't look like a conventional robot that you have today, but that's how they function. So what you have is you have a chassis that is a robot cell that actually now you can put your tooling the way you need it to be. And it doesn't include just the handling, it actually includes the indexing of the part as all of this is all integrated.
So with all these kind of functionality we believe we can build shorter build times of the machines, we can bring down delivery times because we actually can build those cells in parallel instead of, you know, when you build a machine, you have to design it, you have to build it physically. You have to wire the whole machine. Technically you have control panels somewhere further away. Then you find a program and make each cell kind of up and running. What we do this all in parallel because each cell is much smaller, much easier to integrate, much easier to build. And then we just link them together. The other big advantage for us is the easy upgrades that we can actually now think if you do have another process needs to be put in. Quite often automotive, for example, they do quite often change the components. There's not a process involved. It's easier to implement that. The upgrades now take us days that took us weeks before.
It's a big, big difference both in our people and our customers. Because our customers, they don't want us there on their shop floor, they want to run production and we don't want to be there either. So the best thing for us is to pre build it in our place, have it ready, go in and implement it. So this became the optimum solution for scaling production.
Initially we hadn't really seen this so much, but what really became very good because when you have manufacturing, they don't quite know what a volume is going to be, they don't quite know where the bottleneck is going to be, they don't quite know which areas they need to automate next. We find with this system we have done this actually where we started with one or two cells in the beginning and then over time we just added more and more automation to the cell and it was seamless basically. The machine looked the same as it would have been built all in one go, basically.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: So I'm imagining that like you've mentioned, if I have a, say a 12 station adapto machine from Kinexio and, and I need to break it into two zones because I've got this new dispense thing I have to do. I can just buy a dispense cell from you and then literally you come in over the weekend or whatever, break up machines apart, slip the new one in and away you go. Yes, correct.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: That's exactly right. So we, we have an even, for example, a whole machine installing a whole machine. Like we've installed machines like with 10 cells for example, and the whole 10 cells were actually physically put in place, wired in one day. It's very, very quick.
Everything locks together. We paid a lot of attention to make sure the cells actually lock together and they're not just being roughly placed in place so they already integrate very tightly and so they become very rigid machine, but they also come easily apart again, so. Yes, exactly. That's our goal. That's what we're doing.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: I wanted to ask you a little bit about. I know you've done some work in the greenhouse space.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Yeah, we did actually.
We worked a little bit on some, we helped some other manufacturers with some robotics, some custom robot robotics in the agricultural and we kind of started liking that industry. So at that time we worked with others, we helped them, but now we wanted to undertake some of this our own. I always believed in diversifying a little bit. And so the greenhouse is kind of a little bit of a different aspect. So we're still kind of in the early stages where we were with Adopto maybe seven, eight years ago, where we just had built our first projects and we're trying them out and see how well they work.
And so right now we've done projects, let's say we do scouting in greenhouses. And so for that, so we partnered up with another company that actually would do the actual vision application. We didn't want to do it ourselves. We have not much experience with knowing what a plant stress is and so on our plant health situations. We partner with somebody who actually has experience in that side and we developed a robotic side of it. So we can, we have a system that can reach up to 17ft height and carry up to 200 pounds. The ultimate goal is hopefully someday we'll do a robotic harvesting or something like this. So our platform is kind of geared towards that. And right now, the moment we're building a UV C application for strawberries. So it's going to be an autonomous system, has to be at nighttime, obviously it goes in, then does apply UVC to strawberries that then will kill powdery mildew and help reduce the need of chemicals and other aspects treat those strawberries.
But these are new developments, like I said at the moment, on the prototype stage. But we hope then later this year or next year we can start actually promoting them and kind of see where that goes. That industry. We're very excited about it.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: No, that's exciting.
All these new things that you can do on the farm, which is kind of fun. And you're also involved in the innovation community here in London. And you and I have done a of ton talk or two before.
Tell me a little bit about that and. And who's your partner?
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I always believed in very, very strongly in being part of a fostering innovation community, helping other companies the same as when I needed help to develop our systems and know how to run a business and how to know what to focus on and so on. So I've been very active in that. But also we worked a lot on helping graduate students and newcomers to gain work experience. So with all these things, we are very active in the, in the community. I've been on the board of Tech alliance here in town and I've been working with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of young companies. To help them grow and help them scale to mature companies.
Because it's important for all of us. So we need a vibrant environment here in London to actually grow all together.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's so important. And I know I've worked with in Kitchen Waterloo and in Guelph and a few other places with those same kinds of regional innovation center. Konrad, can you tell us a little bit of some of the success stories that you've had with your Adapto product?
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I would love to. Yeah. We had some really good projects that we realized in different industries. Which is the nice thing about Adapto shows you the versatility that the system really is set up for. And for example, there's one system that is more an automotive application which is very typical. Of course, that's in the two second cycle time range. But it had 22 different variations and most of those variations change over without any physical changeover. So you could just on the press of a button, they would go from one model to another.
And this was a system with nine active cells and it was up, installed and running in one day, basically.
Another application that I can think of is the hydrogen fuel cell assembly where we had to handle very thin and flimsy foils and brittle porous carbon sheets, which are very hard to manage and handle.
And we integrated like an AI driven quality inspection system to optimize quality and vision guided robots to actually place these parts very accurately on top of each other.
So that was a good application for precision. And then we did some applications where we integrate our machines with injection molding machines directly into there. So the injection molding robot would load right onto our machine and we would handle it from there and do the final assembly or further assembly.
So again, on this kind of machines, the high uptime requirement was very crucial for the customer because as you can imagine, if the assemblage machine goes down, it's very bad for injection molding, so it cannot happen. So we had to prove a very high uptime. And last but not least, another application I can think of is something like a laboratory dosing equipment of soil samples.
It's not very typical, of course, for automation, you would think, but we realized afterwards there's a lot of industry out there that needs dosing and handling of sample parts in this application actually was very interesting because it's a very sandy and dusty environment and as you may imagine, sand does not go very well with machinery. But the equipment actually held up really, really well. This customer actually, because it's a lab environment, they actually don't have any equipment there traditionally. And so they have no maintenance personnel.
So again, the equipment has to be something that works more like an appliance than of a technical typical kind of an assembly machine where you have a whole maintenance department to keep them up and running. So it really speaks for our high quality and durability of the system that actually allows you to run this system because it's pre engineered, it's pre built and it actually has a lot of these bugs taken out and we test it out for quality and for reliability.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: So when I think of Adapto, I think of some of the processes you're in. So you're doing dispense, you're doing pick and place, you're doing vision.
Any other things where you're, I'm assuming pressing and all those types of typical things are built right into Adapto because it's a servo based system, correct?
[00:17:54] Speaker A: That is correct, yes, exactly. So we have our main functions that are, that are we called and built into the system like of a pre engineered. And then of course we adding functionality into that based on the customer application. I always like to go compare it to people like having a robot.
The robot has basically, you know, what the payload is, you know what the reach is, you know how many axes you have built in. And of course it has already the programming already built in. You have to do the end of arm tooling to tell what exactly you wanted to do and where you want the robot to go. But pretty much all the groundwork is already being pre engineered by somebody else by the robot manufacturer. And so it's the same with our adapter system. It has a lot of functionality built right into the base system. And then of course you need to implement the custom tooling for the actual application. But yeah, you're right, we integrate a lot of different functionalities in there. Some of them actually are custom built. Obviously some of them are built into the system, but the most common one is probably feeding system and handling.
So handling, comport, feeding them to the machine. And there are different types of handling, how you can bring parts to the machine. Like traditional vibratory feeding system, all the way up to robotic flex feeders where your robot kind of looks at different parts and loads them into the machine. So all depends on what a customer needs from there basically. But a lot of those things.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Oh, that's great. So I was going to ask you just as an aside, and this isn't a comment to make a robot supplier sad, but do you use a lot of robots with Adapto?
[00:19:26] Speaker A: So we use robots where they make sense.
I mean I think robots bring up a lot of functionality, but you don't always need to a six axis. And where actually the robot can hinder the U is actually the large space requirements that a robot has. So when, when what we have paid a lot of attention to to actually build our system into the frame, keep the middle of the cell available for custom tooling because we really never know what the customer application really is. So that allows us to keep our floor space on the cell as small as possible without needing to build a big cell for a big robot that needs a lot of elbow space, for example.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And it just makes like that's the kind of European way, right. To make everything smaller because floor space is so expensive. But you've kind of got that built.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Into Adapto and you have less travel distances.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Thank you very much for that example. And Conrad, I want to thank you for coming on today. Did we forget about anything?
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Not that I can think of.
No.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: That's good.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Sounded very. Was very fun. That's very good.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: When you're not innovating with robots and automation and strawberries. What kind of hobbies do you have.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: So much time left afterwards, I guess. But there's family. I love being family and have have them over and being spending time with them and traveling with me. My own family is in Germany. So whenever I have a chance to take a break for a week or two, I usually travel and hopefully at least once or twice a year make it over to Germany. So that pretty much takes most of the time away anyways.
[00:21:01] Speaker B: So how can people find you if they want to reach out and find out maybe more about Adapto or find out more about Kinexeo?
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Well, I would love to hear from people. My easiest way probably would be on LinkedIn.
It's easy to find my LinkedIn page on there for Connexio by the way is spelled K O N N E X I O and my name Konrad Konoff. It should be easy to find and then or of course via email. My email is
[email protected] that is K K O N N E R T H at K o N N E X I o dot com.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: Thanks for clearing that up and thanks again for coming onto the podcast. Our sponsor for this episode is Earhart Automation Systems. Earhart builds and commissions turnkey solutions for their worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing and project management. Delivering world class custom automation on time and on budget. Contact one of their sales engineers to see what Earhart can build for you. Earhart's kind of hard to spell as well. It's EHR H A R D T. I'd like to acknowledge A3 the Association for Advancing Automation. They are the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. You can visit automate.org to learn more. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the Robot Industry Podcast, you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. Today's podcast was produced by Customer Traction Industrial Marketing, and I'd like to thank my team, Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, my business partner Janet, and our sponsor, Earhart Automation Systems.
