Do ~any~ of you use robots for ~anything~ ??

Just asking as I never cease to be amazed at the lack of responses when I mention "robot" around any PM forum.

Any yet there are gazillons of robots out there in the manufacturing world, doing everything from loading/unloading VMC's/grinders/plastic injection/etc., to welding (spot and mig), to painting.

The service and parts for these things is a little bit like it is for CMM's sometimes, where you are beholding to the manufacturer of the machine for nearly everything. Which can be pretty annoying if said manuf is more interested in declaring your 2000 year machine "obsolete" and selling you a new one, than they are in helping with problems.

Thus my perceived need for a place to help each other solve robot maintenance and programming issues....and yet, no one seems to care. Is this because the vast majority of robots are used in the largest manufacturing concerns where maintenance costs are a minor issue in the overall scheme of things and therefore few are inspired to seek alternatives ? or ?

Were you proposing a forum for robots?
I think that keeping it in the CNC forum would be appropriate.
Even Splitting the Haas out fo CNC was a mistake, we can all learn from CNC issues, not enough hours in a day to read too many forums.

Several people here have robots, I know that..
Tony probobly has the most experience with them.

The only place I have seen them is high production automotive ,plastic injection molding and production robotic welding. They have their own service / support / maintainence / programming people because it is such an intregal part of their production process. I would think smaller manufacturers would need a distributor or manufacturer with good applications support or a network of users like this. I'll be interested in seeing how much response you get. RJT

I did look at them years back when we were doing very high quantities of parts but the was no guarantee how long the work would stay here before being offshored so I found the Polish immigrants a better option.
I currently have some Fanuc Arc Mate 100i robots and can`t even get any interest in breaking them and selling the controls and drives seperately.
Noticed some Adepts on ebay uk tonight at less than $300 buy it now.

Milacron said:

Just asking as I never cease to be amazed at the lack of responses when I mention "robot" around any PM forum.

Any yet there are gazillons of robots out there in the manufacturing world, doing everything from loading/unloading VMC's/grinders/plastic injection/etc., to welding (spot and mig), to painting.

The service and parts for these things is a little bit like it is for CMM's sometimes, where you are beholding to the manufacturer of the machine for nearly everything. Which can be pretty annoying if said manuf is more interested in declaring your 2000 year machine "obsolete" and selling you a new one, than they are in helping with problems.

Thus my perceived need for a place to help each other solve robot maintenance and programming issues....and yet, no one seems to care. Is this because the vast majority of robots are used in the largest manufacturing concerns where maintenance costs are a minor issue in the overall scheme of things and therefore few are inspired to seek alternatives ? or ?

Click to expand...

We are a reasonably large organisation of about 200 production employees. We use robots for a variety of tasks including machine loading and polishing of door furniture. All programming and re-programming is done in house as required.
In reviewing our organisation, you comment regarding robots being used in larger manufacturing concerns is a valid one.
Regards
Mike

Does the robot army I'm building to take over the world count?

We had 2 machines with gantry loaders with articulated grippers that were nothing but trouble when we got them. The only guy who had any idea how to program them left and that was it, they were disposed of.

I have one unemployed Motoman ratt now. I bought two for a possible job (used) that didn't pan out. I have sold one, and still have the othern.

If I don't sell it - I will eventually put it to werk... Haven't ran the volume to justify that recently tho. Just had a call on it the other day - but the guy wanted 2.

These will be more and more popular in the job shops as time goes by.

Mine just holds down the concrete in that one spot currently. LOL!


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox

micro said:

Does the robot army I'm building to take over the world count?

We had 2 machines with gantry loaders with articulated grippers that were nothing but trouble when we got them. The only guy who had any idea how to program them left and that was it, they were disposed of.

Click to expand...

Happened at an injection plant I worked at. The Forman's favorite drinking buddy was "in charge" of the robotics, every aspect from programming to end of arm tooling to integration with the process.

Needless to say we were up a creek when he fell off his motorcycle and died. The robot-manufacturer was very helpful and you can bet your last dollar we distributed that information across several employees, myself included.



Two jobs ago we looked at robots for custom sheetmetal applications such as a press-brake and pem-serting. The idea was to keep staffing levels stable by having a robot arm that could take the place of a worker for long runs so we didn't have to disrupt production by moving someone from another area or hiring a temp.

The aspect we found to be the deal-breaker was the programming. The ones we looked at didn't have a "teach" function. We'd have to train someone and hope they didn't walk.



Place I'm at now is looking at a robot to do my job, and I'm helping them look. Pick up the part, put it in the collet, close collet, turn on lathe, move tooling around, eject part. Right now, I am the robot. What we need is somthing that can do this job (10k's of of them per month, never-ending aparently) yet easy enough to retool for other potential high-volume jobs down the road.

Mark McGrath said:

Noticed some Adepts on ebay uk tonight at less than $300 buy it now.

Click to expand...

That's like saying you noticed some Volkswagens on eBay UK for $300 Buy it Now....i.e. utterly meaningless without more info....they might be totalled, missing engines, 1982 year, and have 200,000 miles for example. If it's an early 90's Adept of small size looking dirty and no pix of the control innards and no guarantee it's all there, and works...then $300 is about right. But if late 90's mid size, clean, less than 4,000 hours, strong indications of it working properly...whole nuther ballgame...could be worth $10,000 +.

I sold a 1995 Staubli 120 RX with Adept MV-19 control a few months ago for $9,500...but if it had been just three years newer it would have had a control that is more "current" and supported better and therefore worth $15,000+. There are many nuances that have major effects on a robots value.

cloos welding robots

ya, I've P.M. them. No meaningful rebuilds though. seems like they start causing problems and they get replaced. no room for the old when new one with more features are always ready to go. just throw old one out and bolt down the new one. load program and walk away. perfect corp. workers, never turn down overtime and work till no longer able.

Don,
We've got a hundred or two 6-axis Kawasaki and 30 or 40 more Nachi's. I do the programming, process design, a lot of the integration, end of arm tooling design, etc for the Kawasaki. We've (me and 4 other guys) have been averaging one install about every 2.5 weeks for the last 3 years. We've done 3 since Jan 2. Will slow down some though as they have capital frozen at the moment and we have some longer builds coming up.

Adept is not something I'm familiar with.

As for support / maintenance....there just isn't much to do...at least not with Kawasaki. We get a 2 year warranty with them, although we do any maintenance / repairs required in house, unless something is really, really out of whack, and the Kawasaki tech is there in 4 hours.
We've got some as old as 1994 models, a gazillion cycles on those things (4.3 sec full-motion cycle, 24/7 for 12 years), they averaged _less than 1 hour_ unscheduled downtime a year. The only scheduled maintenance is lubrication every 6 months.
We got scared of them, as they were in a critical application, and swapped them for new models in 2006. They were moved to a much less critical application and one is still running today. The other finally died and we replaced it.
I think we've changed a couple gearboxes and a motor or two that got oil contaminated because of something stupid we were doing, out of well over 100 robots since 2004. These are feeding CNC machines, usually the end of the arm is in a heavy spray of coolant as it's exchanging parts, no issues with that.
We checked maintenance costs and compared to our linear gantry loaded machines....
7 robots had a total maintenance cost (parts & labor) of about $3800 for a full year. All of that was in cables & sensors on the end of arm tooling. That has dropped significantly as we have switched to a much more robotic-class cable type (Turck Flexlife). Compared to about $8k / yr *EACH* for the gantry loaders, the maintenance costs for a robot are rediculously low.

Well......around 10 years ago I bought 2 old Fanuc pick & place (1981? forgot the model number now, maybe a model "0" ?) at the scrap yard....$300.
One they broke the gripper on, other one intact.
Took the drive/motors/misc off the one and scrapped the rest.
Taught the other one to pick a beer can off a stool, rotate it upside down, and place it on another worktable nearby.

These came from a local plant and were loading a cnc lathe and mill, saw them working years earlier. Doing just what Sanders company wants them for.

Tonytn36 said:

Don,
We've got a hundred or two 6-axis Kawasaki and 30 or 40 more Nachi's. I do the programming, process design, a lot of the integration, end of arm tooling design, etc for the Kawasaki. We've (me and 4 other guys) have been averaging one install about every 2.5 weeks for the last 3 years. We've done 3 since Jan 2. Will slow down some though as they have capital frozen at the moment and we have some longer builds coming up.

Click to expand...

What about the Nachi's...good machines, good support ? And what size/capacity or models are they ?

Adept is not something I'm familiar with.

Click to expand...

Adept is mostly known for smaller 4 and 5 axis pick and place robots, but they provide the controls for Staubli (French company but based right here in SC for USA distribution) Staubli's are small to medium size 6 axis typically. Staubli's are one of the "neater" robots in that everything is enclosed...no motors, cables, encoders, etc exposed...good for "clean room" applications as well as painting.

Staubli is awful for phone support....at least on machines older than 2000 or so. And what I mean by "awful" is they are reluctant to tell you anything helpful and even when they do there is a high likelyhood the advice will be flat out wrong. Adept better in that regard but their prices on electronic parts are insane... $12,000 for one SIO module for example...a module that is nothing more than one small board, and a standard hard drive. OTOH, there are many thousands of Adepts "out there" so it's not too hard to find used parts. The same $12,000 module just sold on eBay "refurbished" last week for $250 !

Milacron said:

What about the Nachi's...good machines, good support ? And what size/capacity or models are they ?

Click to expand...

I pretty sure they are 50kg models (Presto), they are in another dept and I'm not all that familiar with them. I do know they have had a few failed triple gear heads, but I'm not sure the root cause of those failures (could have been operator crashes as they had some "oh sh$ts!" in programming / interface to begin with - they were not requiring the robot to be in a safe "home" position before allowing start-up - a definite no-no in a multiple operator manufacturing situation). Support seems to be very good.

Robots? Robots?

The Management here said "We don't need no Steenking Robots.."

So when the last Kaizan Crew marched in with there Lock-Stepped Jack Booted Gestapo spouting "Zero Inventory" and "Single Piece Flow".

They 5 S'ed the Robots. Meaning they had somebody Cut the robots from 5 of our machines. Not remove the Robots and store them or sell them, But cut them off and scrapped them. We had Three Nakumuura Lathes with Robots and Two two Mazak Lathes with robots. Now these were runs "Lights Out" machines with Redundant tools and Part probes for QA Checks.

Excellent Dog & Pony Show machines that to this day would impress you.

Now this happened about 10 years ago but still the management is leary of the Robot word. We do have a large Hitachi-Seiki Lathe with a gantry loading robot that picks up raw castings machines the first Op and transfers the first op to the second op side runs second op and puts the finished part down to a conveyor table. But this is all internal and not as good a show as an Arm picking parts up and doing the work.

Later

Mohawk

Mark McGrath said:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ADEPT-ARM_W0Q...ryZ42899QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Click to expand...

Well, there you go...early 90's models that aren't worth much even in good condition...with the icing on the cake being these are with no control......like a car without a motor (except worse) and no indication of condition.

Worthless except for parts and a totally bogus indicator of "what robots are selling for these days"

Ox said:

I have one unemployed Motoman ratt now. I bought two for a possible job (used) that didn't pan out. I have sold one, and still have the othern.

Click to expand...

Just for my curiosity....are your Motoman's late 80's/early 90's models with yellow paint or the newer light gray ones ? I've got two of the "yeller" Motomans which I only bought because the Miller weld units that came with them are 2000 year and practically brand new. And the robots themselves are astoundingly clean for such old robots...much less old welding robots...which are usually filthy dirty. And yet they may be difficult to sell for much due to their age.

We got two new Fanucs. Both dedicated task, a M20-ia and a M710-ic. They are vacuum pick-and-place with a guide pin setter. Our custom pin setters are problematic, but the Fanuc's perform flawlessly.

Milacron said:

Just for my curiosity....are your Motoman's late 80's/early 90's models with yellow paint or the newer light gray ones ? I've got two of the "yeller" Motomans which I only bought because the Miller weld units that came with them are 2000 year and practically brand new. And the robots themselves are astoundingly clean for such old robots...much less old welding robots...which are usually filthy dirty. And yet they may be difficult to sell for much due to their age.

Click to expand...

No - it is a current model HP-50. Setup for part manipulation. Not welding.

Born on date of 11/04.


Ratt'cheer


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox