Project Description
Results at a glance
Paradigm, the manufacturer of high-performance speakers, relies on the Cobots from Universal Robots. To meet the demand for labour-intensive products, the polishing department had to be automated with Cobots. This significantly increased production output and also greatly improved the working environment.
“Thanks to the robots from Universal Robots, we were able to increase our throughput by 50%.”
The challenges in the company
The “Midnight Cherry” finish was released by Paradigm for a new range of speakers. The demand was much higher than expected. So much more loudspeakers had to be produced.
“To achieve this finish, several layers of varnish have to be applied and after each layer is applied, you have to polish, polish, polish. This involves a lot of manual work. The difficulty here is to find skilled workers for this job; we simply couldn’t find enough skilled workers,” explained Oleg Bogdanov, Technical Manager.
There was even a Cartesian robot in operation. However, this required a high level of safety precautions to ensure that the employees were not put at risk.
According to John Phillips, Senior Manager of Production Services, until then there was no way a robot could work with an employee. However, this was necessary because the machine had to be closely monitored during polishing. However, precisely this control is not possible with a separate robot cell.
High product quality
High demand
Lack of skilled workers
The solution from Universal Robots
Through an expert, Paradigm became aware of Universal Robots collaborative robots and that they could be a solution to the “Midnight Cherry” problem.
” Collaborative robots represented a new technology and we did extensive research into it. This type of robot allows a human and a robot to work together in the same workspace. Robots and humans now work together in the form of pendulum operations, where interaction is possible in a safe environment and the human can verify that the robot has performed the work properly before the final polishing is performed by the human. These workflows are based on very close cooperation,” explains Phillips.
For conventional robots, many safety precautions have to be taken to ensure that employees have a safe working environment. This makes the implementation period very long. The introduction of the Cartesian robot at Paradigm took 5 months. In comparison, the introduction of Universal Robots Cobot took only one month.
Another advantage of the Cobots is the built-in force feedback function. The pressure that the robot arm has to exert can be precisely adjusted in the user interface of Universal Robots collaborative robots. This is especially important when polishing sensitive surfaces.
Paradigm is already working on other applications that can be automated with a UR robot.
UR5 Roboter bei Paradigm
