What changed when they automated
What changed when an Indiana molder replaced forklift laps with a mobile robot loop
Metro Plastics wanted forklifts off its production floor and finished parts checked sooner. A MiR200 with a counter height top module now loops the floor every 30 minutes, pausing at each press to collect parts for quality inspection. Defects surface while a job is still running instead of days later.
The short answer
A family owned injection molder running up to 20 jobs at once put one autonomous mobile robot on a continuous loop that pauses about 30 seconds at each running press and completes the floor roughly every 30 minutes, delivering finished goods to quality inspection. The published payoff is faster defect detection on jobs that typically last about 2.4 days. The account below is the maker's own case story, so read every number as the vendor published it, not as an audited result.
What the job looked like before
Forklifts ran laps on the production floor to collect finished parts, and quality inspection saw those parts days after molding, so a defect could run for most of a job before anyone caught it. The company wanted forklifts off the floor for safety and inspection closer to the press.
What they put in
A MiR200 autonomous mobile robot with a custom counter height top module sized for inspection work, integrated over Wi-Fi with the shop's in-house software. The vendor reports mapping and initial programming took a couple of hours.
What changed, in their numbers
A pause of about 30 seconds at each press and a floor loop roughly every 30 minutes. Up to 20 jobs at once with a typical job of about 2.4 days. The president is quoted that the robot was about half the cost of the wire guided vehicle the shop had considered, a vendor claim without dollar figures. Payback and payload were not published in the case story.
What this does not tell you
It does not tell you the cost, and the half the cost remark compares against a wire guided vehicle, not against doing nothing. It does not quantify the scrap reduction that is the real business case. And the integration with in-house software took IT involvement the account mentions but does not size.
What to verify in your own plant
Whether a 30 minute loop matches your press cycles and box fill rates, because a fast job can outpace it. Who builds the top module, since the module does the actual work. Floor condition and pedestrian aisles. And what inspection would do with parts that arrive every half hour instead of every shift.
Sources: https://mobile-industrial-robots.com/cases/metro-plastics
Describe your floor and your press count to Joe, the concierge on this site, and it will tell you whether a loop or a call system fits and what the inspection side has to change.
Related on this site
- Material movement
- Cart tugging between departments
- Inspection
- Robots for plastics and packaging
- The casebook of published deployments
The strongest case for this robot was scrap, not steps. Shortening the gap between molding and inspection turned a material handling robot into a quality tool.
Put it to the test on your own job
Tell Joe what you are running and he will apply this to your numbers, including telling you when a robot is the wrong answer.
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