May 2024 Volume 6

AUTOMATION

Cobots Are a Force-Multiplying Lever for the Manufacturing World By Drew Akey and Josh Pawley

Josh Pawley, also a Vectis Founding Partner and Vice President of Business Development, believes that cobots will lift the industry from a state where skilled labor is in chronically short supply to one that attracts a new and more diverse talent pool. “Cobots make manufacturing cool,” says Pawley. “If you ask someone to weld up 300 brackets a week, that doesn’t sound interesting. If you ask them to use a cobot to weld 300 brackets in one-third the time of a manual welder, that’s a challenge the young generation can buy into.” Born for Ease-of-Use, Flexibility, and Robustness Based in Loveland, Colorado, and employing 30 people, Vectis has deployed over 550 cobot welding & plasma cutting systems to the North American manufacturing industry in just their first five years of business. The company offers a comprehensive port folio of these robust cobot fabrication “tools” featuring arms from Universal Robots. One of the industry’s cobot pioneers and today the market leader, Universal Robots (“UR”) has sold more than 75,000 cobots worldwide. Vectis mounts a UR arm on various deployment options to meet a variety of application needs – whether welding small parts on a gridded fixture table or rolling up their RoverTM or Park’N’ArcTM options to large structures.

“We named our company Vectis, which is Latin for lever, because we believe automation is the lever that will move the world and make fabrication faster, better and safer,” says Vectis Automation President and Co-founder Drew Akey. Compared to traditional automation, collaborative robots (or “cobots”), drastically reduce various thresh olds for automating – cost, complexity, floorspace, and skill level. Cobots have force and torque sensors in the arm itself, allowing for built-in operator safety – in turn, providing more flexibility, less foot print, and lower cost-to-deploy relative to caged traditional robots. “Traditional robots were born in the 70’s and 80’s for the automo tive industry – where there are armies of robotics engineers, and a third of a second of cycle time can really matter. So, naturally, tradi tional robots prioritized speed over everything else” says Akey. “On the flipside, cobots were created for those shops where traditional automation solutions provided too many hurdles to implement. So, cobots prioritize flexibility, cost-efficiency, and ease-of-adoption."

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