Cobot fills the night shift at a 25 to 50 person machine shop
Precision CNC machining, medical device components · CNC machine tending · Trade press
An independent editorial outlet wrote its own account of this deployment. Numbers still appear exactly as published, and still need verification against your own job.
The job
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 machining center through a three operation cycle, loading two vise fixtures and a fourth axis rotary fixture, then moving finished parts through a rinse and dry station.
The shop
25 to 50 employees per the vendor case story; local unemployment around 3 percent at the time, reported-by-trade-press.
The equipment
Universal Robots UR5e with a PHD Pneu-Connect pneumatic gripper (a UR+ product); pneumatic fixtures and machine door actuators wired through the cobot's I/O; parts rinsing and drying station.
The published numbers
Payload: not published. Rate: weekly output rose from 255 to 370 parts, a 43 percent throughput increase, reported-by-trade-press and also published-by-vendor; the machining cycle runs 56 minutes with about 6 minutes of robot activity, reported-by-trade-press. Cost: purchase price not published; production cost fell 23 percent, reported-by-trade-press and published-by-vendor. Payback: about 12 months, a vendor claim repeated by the trade article. Also cited: 30 micron repeatability of the arm.
Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.
What we would check before believing it applies to you
The economics work because the robot's 6 minutes of work per 56 minute cycle lets one arm cover long unattended stretches; short cycle parts would need a very different cell and much faster tending. This was a high volume repeat part with stable fixturing, which is the easy end of machine tending; a job shop with weekly changeovers should verify re-teaching time and fixture swap effort before assuming the same payback. Check that your machine can be fitted for automatic door and workholding actuation, since that plumbing was integral here. The precision claim mattered because the part had threaded features across three sequential fixtures; measure your own true positioning needs rather than assuming cobot repeatability suffices. Lights out running also implies chip, coolant, and alarm handling that no cobot solves by itself.
Sources
Is your job like this one?
Tell Joe what you are running. He will give you a straight preliminary read, and he will tell you if a robot is the wrong answer for your situation.
Read the cnc machine tending guide