Injection molder replaces forklift laps with an AMR loop
Custom plastic injection molding · AMR material movement · Vendor published
This account comes from a robot maker, integrator, or their marketing partner. Treat every performance and payback figure as advertising until an engineer verifies it against your own job.
The job
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, pausing at each running press to collect finished goods and delivering them to quality inspection, so defects surface while a job is still on the press instead of days later.
The shop
Family owned since 1974; runs four six hour shifts Monday through Friday, published-by-vendor; headcount not published.
The equipment
MiR200 autonomous mobile robot with a custom counter height top module sized for quality inspection work, integrated over Wi-Fi with the shop's in-house Metro Connect software.
The published numbers
Payload: not published in the case story. Rate: the robot pauses about 30 seconds at each press and completes a floor loop roughly every 30 minutes, published-by-vendor; the shop runs up to 20 jobs at once with a typical job lasting about 2.4 days, published-by-vendor. Cost: the president is quoted that the AMR was about half the cost of the wire guided vehicle alternative considered, a vendor claim without dollar figures; mapping and initial programming took a couple of hours, published-by-vendor. Payback: not published.
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 quality angle distinguishes this from generic material handling: shortening the interval between molding and inspection turned the AMR into a scrap reduction tool, which is a stronger business case than saved steps. The custom counter height module is a reminder that the top module, not the robot, does the actual work; budget engineering time for it. Molders should verify that a 30 minute loop matches their press cycle and box fill rates, since a fast running job can outpace the loop. The half the cost remark compares against a wire guided AGV, not against doing nothing, so build your own baseline. Floor condition, pedestrian aisles, and the removal of forklift traffic all belong in the safety assessment, and integrating with in-house software took real IT involvement here.
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 amr material movement guide