Personal spacing is one means to keep workers safe. But factory workspaces are often most efficiently configured with people working in close proximity. Separation cannot be achieved without reducing production capacity. But what if you could add robots and both provide spacing and increase productivity?
In this conceptual arrangement of a grinding and deburring department, workers are paired with an assisting robot. The robot does heavy material removal while the finisher does the final fine blending and inspection. It is a truly collaborative arrangement where the robot makes the finisher more productive. Robot collaborations such as this have been shown to increase productivity 85% over either robots or humans alone*. The compact footprint and the inherent safety of the Touch Robot make arrangements like this possible.
* MIT research data cited in Financial Times article “Meet the cobots : humans and robots together on the factory floor”, May 5, 2016.