A robot that adjusts in real time

When an order changes in the ERP at two in the morning, the robot should know before anyone on the floor does.

In most robot cells, the program decides what happens. It is written for a part and a sequence, and it runs that sequence until someone changes it. That works well when the same part runs for weeks. When one robot serves several machines and the order book changes during the shift, the plan changes faster than anyone can rewrite a sequence.

Two different kinds of change

It helps to separate two things. The first is a new part. That still needs a robot program, and with our Dynamic Program Generator the operator creates it in 1–3 minutes, offline, while the machine keeps producing. Compared with 10–60 hours for traditional programming, that is what makes small series worth automating.

The second is everything that happens once the parts exist: which part to run next, in which machine, and in what order. That is what the robot adjusts in real time. Input from the ERP, quality control, smart sensors and vision changes the active program and the flow while production runs.

Choose the flow, not the robot sequence

With Dynamic Flow Optimization, the operator chooses the product flow instead of programming a robot sequence, for several products at the same time. The robot program is generated dynamically from that choice.

Take one robot serving two machines, with several products running at once. The robot measures the actual cycle times in each machine and uses them, together with the orders from the ERP, to optimise the sequence. If the ERP moves an order forward, the flow follows.

Adaptive, and still deterministic

Real-time does not mean unpredictable. The program generation is fully deterministic. We run large robots at full speed, where a stop or a collision can be costly, so we use no AI in the robot programs or the movements.

Every part is also fully traceable, at every step.

When you need it

If a cell runs one part in one machine for months, most of this adds little. The value grows with the number of products and machines that share one robot, and with how often the plan changes during a shift.

Next step

If you have machines where the planning changes more often than the parts, we would like to hear how you run them today. Contact us, and we can look together at whether one robot could serve them.