The automation casebook
Documented robot deployments at small and midsized manufacturers. Every entry is an original summary of a published account, with full source links, and every number appears exactly as the source published it.
Each entry is graded. Vendor published means the account comes from a robot maker, integrator, or their marketing partner, so performance and payback figures are advertising until verified. Trade press means an independent editorial outlet wrote its own account. Where a source did not publish a figure, we say not published rather than guessing.
Palletizing
Cobot palletizing at a family wine bottler
Raumland GmbH in Germany filters, labels, bottles, and ships wine for many producers, handling more than five million bottles across roughly 2,500 different wines a year. At the end of the bottling li...
Read the entryRobotic palletizer on a winery bottling line
Martin Ray Winery in California ran a bottling line where employees stacked wine cases by hand all day, each case around 15 kg. The winery automated end-of-line palletizing so the crew no longer lifts...
Read the entryCNC machine tending
Cobot fills the night shift at a 25 to 50 person machine shop
Toolcraft Inc. of Monroe, Washington won a large medical device order that needed round the clock production, but could not hire for a third shift in a tight labor market. A cobot now tends a vertical...
Read the entryTwo rail mounted cobots tend three CNCs in an optics shop
WALT Machine Inc., a 25 person US shop, faces a seasonal crunch each spring: roughly 6,000 camera housings due in about two months. Rather than add machines and people, the shop hung a cobot from an o...
Read the entryWelding
Four cobot welding cells at an Ohio fabricator
Raymath, an Ohio metal fabricator, could not hire enough welders to keep up with demand, so it moved repetitive MIG work onto cobot welding cells and later added a cobot TIG system for aluminum parts ...
Read the entryA bracket shop puts its first welding cobot to work in two days
Iron Supports, a small fabricator that grew out of a garage operation, was turning down work because it could not hire or train welders fast enough. The shop bought a packaged cobot welding system and...
Read the entryPackaging and case packing
Case packing 1.5 million eggs a day with one arm per line
Cascina Italia, an Italian egg company, packs cartons of eggs into large corrugated cases for supermarket distribution. Workers used to build these bulky cases by hand at line output stations; a cobot...
Read the entryGentle gripper packs fresh herbs at a Danish greenhouse
Rosborg Food Holding of Odense, Denmark, the country's largest producer of herbs and mini plants, packs cut herbs for grocery distribution. A cobot cell now folds cardboard boxes and places cut herbs ...
Read the entryAssembly and screwdriving
Screwdriving and box erecting at a fourth generation toolmaker
Darex, the family owned Oregon company behind the Work Sharp brand, assembles consumer knife sharpeners with many small screws in plastic housings. One cobot now drives screws into housings while anot...
Read the entryA rented cobot rebuilt quality on a Miami electronics line
Creating Revolutions, a small Miami company, assembles a puck sized service pager for restaurants and hotels. Manual soldering, drilling, and silicone dispensing produced double digit reject rates, so...
Read the entryAMR material movement
Two AMRs run bus routes through a family owned power electronics plant
Magna-Power builds made to order power systems in a vertically integrated Flemington, New Jersey plant, so parts flow constantly between sheet metal, machining, board assembly, and final test. People ...
Read the entryInjection molder replaces forklift laps with an AMR loop
Metro Plastics, an Indiana molder family owned since 1974, wanted forklifts off its production floor and finished parts checked faster. An autonomous mobile robot now loops the floor continuously, pau...
Read the entryAsk about a job like yours
Joe can talk through how any of these compares to your own operation, and will tell you where the published numbers would not carry over.
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