Is Aussie & NZ Industry Up To Scratch?
By Colin Wells MD Robotic Automation pl
Over the past 30 odd years I have seen some highly innovative and world class Robotic Solutions employed in Australian and NZ industry’s. Given the size of our manufacturing Ind our population of Robots employed is not to bad compared to other developed nations.
Industrial Robots back then and even more so nowadays are ideally suited to the tough manufacturing landscape that exists in our part of the world which is : Low volume’s, small batch size , and ever changing requirements.
I have often thought that if Robots had not been invented elsewhere somebody down-under would have come up with the concept as it’s a perfect fit for our industry for the following 10 reasons not in any order as depending on case by case as to what’s most important to a client.
- Highly flexible tool to adapt to ever-changing client requirements.
- Huge range of payload and reach options to choose from.
- Very simple to program virtually anybody could learn the basics of robot programing.
- Highly user friendly, clients can edit or change programs themselves if they choose to.
- Huge number of standard tools, grippers etc and software options available.
- Connectivity at an all-time level enabling a robot to easily fit into and be part of existing Plant.
- Even more safety incorporated as they now have built in CE compliant Safety modules.
- Highly versatile with the ability to do more than one application at the same time.
- Robots commonly have 50 thousand hours MTBF so are very reliable.
- Last but not least is price, you get a lot of robot nowadays for far less $$ purely due to the sheer volumes the Robot manufactures produce using their own robots to pump out 24 hours a day with very little “Thermal units input “ IE human’s and without the lights or heating on!
If your company has not yet got around to looking at what Robots can do for your plant then maybe now is as good a time as ever.