The automation casebook
Documented robot and drone deployments: at manufacturers, at the industrial and infrastructure operators who fly inspections, and at the public agencies that buy with public money. 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 an equipment 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. Agency published means the operating organization's or public agency's own report: no sales motive, but still an organization describing its own program. 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 entryPick and place
Roaming cobot stacks trays and picks conveyor parts at a 54 person molder
At AIM Processing in Colorado, a worker sat at the palletizing station and every 90 seconds moved a tray into position for a cartesian robot, spending only a couple of seconds actually working each cy...
Read the entryAerospace shop doubles glue cell output and cuts scrap from 15 percent to 3 percent
Tool Gauge in Tacoma, Washington ran an assembly where operators picked end caps for a plastic extruded panel and dispensed glue into a channel so narrow that the shop was seeing hand fatigue and inju...
Read the entryA 25 person optics shop runs its Haas overnight with a vision guided cobot
Walt Machine Inc. of Lumberton, Mississippi receives one order each spring for about 6,000 camera housings and runs the whole thing on a single Haas VM-3, with 30 to 45 minutes of machining per side. ...
Read the entryInspection
Robot presents all 96 cavities and cuts shot inspection time by 64 percent
Vision Technical Molding in Manchester, Connecticut runs a 96 cavity medical tool at under 10 second cycles, and qualifying a shot means checking a part from every cavity for dimensional accuracy and ...
Read the entryA 33 person molder checks 200 tiny holes in 3.5 seconds with a robot fed camera
Performance Plastics Ltd. in Cincinnati molds a fluoropolymer medical disposable four to a shot, and each part carries an area with 50 holes of 23 mil diameter separated by 12 mil webbing, plus a 15 m...
Read the entryCeiling mounted cobot camera checks a safety critical connector inside 60 second takt
On a horseshoe shaped assembly line in Youngstown, Ohio, Comprehensive Logistics had to confirm on every engine cradle subassembly that a steering gear wire harness connector was fully seated and lock...
Read the entrySanding and finishing
Robotic grinding cuts tray rework by 95 percent at a Virginia fabricator
Lawrence Brothers Inc. of Bluefield, Virginia produces 1,000 metal material handling trays a day, and every one needed a grinding step that FANUC describes as tiresome and injury prone. The job drove ...
Read the entryForce controlled belt grinding takes tailpipe seam finishing under one minute
ATJ Automotive GmbH in Johanngeorgenstadt, Germany finishes the weld seams on elliptical stainless steel tailpipe ends, a cosmetic surface that customers judge by eye. Operators were doing it by hand ...
Read the entryThirteen person stove shop automates weld seam grinding on steel shells
Rondo Ringkachelofen GmbH near Pentling, Bavaria builds wood burning stoves largely by hand, and grinding the weld seams on the curved steel shells is described by the vendor as monotonous, arduous an...
Read the entryPress brake tending
Robot on a track feeds a 250 ton brake at an 85 person attachment maker
Jenkins Iron and Steel of Long Prairie, Minnesota had automated cutting first, running three fiber lasers with load and unload automation off a material storage tower, and the cut parts then piled up ...
Read the entryStandard bending cell installed in ten days brings lights out bending to a family OEM
KWM Gutterman of Rockdale, Illinois builds most of its gutter roll forming machines in house, cutting parts on laser and saw and then bending them, and could not fill press brake roles; fabrication ma...
Read the entryCobot unloads a brake press in six feet of floor space with no guarding
At Etalex in Quebec, Canada, one employee unloaded a brake press by hand eight hours a day, reaching into the press area in a busy aisle where people walk past constantly and there was no room for saf...
Read the entryDrone inspection and survey
Dominion Energy cuts nuclear condenser inspections from 8 days to 8 hours
Dominion Energy's Surry Power Plant in Surry County, Virginia runs two reactors with two main condensers. Condenser inspections used to mean building scaffolding inside the condenser and working crews...
Read the entryReturkraft replaces 450,000 Euros of boiler scaffolding with a UT drone
Returkraft operates a waste-to-energy plant in Norway and must inspect its boiler internals for corrosion, pitting, and tube wall thinning. The traditional method put a team of 10 to 15 scaffolders in...
Read the entryVeolia Water flies drones through sewers instead of sending crews in
Veolia Water inspects underground sewer collectors and wastewater assets where the old choices were human entry into contaminated confined spaces or tethered cameras that required cleaning the line fi...
Read the entryParsons flies roof surveys across 121 Job Corps campuses for the US Department of Labor
Parsons supports the US Department of Labor's Job Corps program with architecture, engineering, and construction management services, and uses drones to inspect campus roofs nationwide. Drones capture...
Read the entryBoral ends stockpile write-downs at six Victorian quarries with drone surveys
Boral's Victorian Metro region runs six quarries supplying crushed rock, sand, and gravel for the Melbourne market. Inventory was previously measured by a third-party manned-aircraft survey twice a ye...
Read the entryERCOT solar operator cuts underperformance 75 percent with a docked drone
An independent power producer operating a 150 MWdc utility-scale site in the ERCOT region was fighting recurring ground faults and chronic underperformance flagged as combiner, inverter-level, and tra...
Read the entryAT&T puts contractor drones on cell tower inspections across its network
AT&T launched a national drone program and engaged contractor pilots to fly inspections of its cell towers, replacing a share of routine climbs with standardized aerial footage. In parallel, the AT&T ...
Read the entryStantec halves a landmark bridge inspection with autonomous drones
Stantec inspects bridges, tunnels, and highway structures where traditional access meant snooper trucks, rope access, and lane closures over live traffic. The firm now pairs its own inspectors, who ar...
Read the entryPublic agencies
Drone as first responder at Chula Vista Police Department
The Chula Vista Police Department in California sends teleoperated drones to live 911 calls ahead of patrol units, with a pilot in a drone operations center listening to calls in real time and launchi...
Read the entryKnightscope K5 park patrol at Huntington Park Police Department
The Huntington Park Police Department in Los Angeles County leased a Knightscope K5 autonomous security robot, nicknamed HP RoboCop, and deployed it in June 2019 to patrol Salt Lake Park as a continuo...
Read the entryCCTV sewer inspection program at the City of Eugene
The City of Eugene, Oregon runs a standing closed-circuit television inspection program to view, record, and assess the condition of the city's wastewater and stormwater pipes. Trained operators place...
Read the entryAutonomous mowing at Franklin Parks in Tennessee
The City of Franklin, Tennessee's parks department has outsourced mowing to contractor Landscape Services, Inc. since 2018, and in 2023 the contractor proposed adding autonomous mowers, which the city...
Read the entryBomb squad robot purchase at Mobile Police Department
The Mobile City Council in Alabama approved the purchase of a Remotec Andros Spartan unmanned ground vehicle for the police department's explosive ordnance disposal unit on February 18, 2025. The robo...
Read the entryUnderwater ROV recoveries at Iredell County Sheriff's Office
The Iredell County Sheriff's Office lake enforcement team in North Carolina has operated a submersible remotely operated vehicle since 2024 to locate and recover drowning victims in low-visibility wat...
Read the entryEvolv weapons screening pilot in the New York City subway
The New York Police Department ran a 30-day pilot of Evolv walkthrough weapons scanners at subway station entrances starting July 27, 2024, rotating the units across 20 stations. Officers screened rid...
Read the entryRobot disarms barricaded suspect for Los Angeles County sheriff
On the evening of September 8, 2016, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies in Lancaster, California used the department's Andros robot to end a standoff of more than six hours with a 51-yea...
Read the entryUnderwater inspection and dive teams
The Coast Guard buys Mission Specialist Defender ROVs to keep divers out of the water
The United States Coast Guard inspects piers and hulls, surveys subsurface infrastructure, responds to disasters and runs search and rescue in water that is often dark, cold and fast moving. In Decemb...
Read the entryFloor care
A Cincinnati airport puts a Neo scrubber on 200,000 square feet a week
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport doubled its passenger count from 4.5 million to 9.1 million a year and had 120 in-house and contract housekeepers scrubbing terminal floors by hand-d...
Read the entryA Las Vegas lighting warehouse doubles its floor and its cleaning output with one robot
Christie Lites doubled its Las Vegas warehouse from 80,000 to 160,000 square feet, and the walk-behind scrubber that had covered the old floor could not keep up with the new one at any reasonable labo...
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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