Robot's not talking to each other. Families not talking to each other. It must be the festive season!
Communication is tricky at this time of year. During the festive period you want everyone to be on good speaking terms, but that can be asking the impossible, can't it? Families are forced to spend more time together in one week than they have over the whole past year. There's a high risk of communication failures.
Your sisters have stopped talking to each other. Your parents are snapping at each other. Your grandmother has fallen out with the next door neighbor who — for some unknown reason — still pops in every three hours just to continue the argument. You and the cat are not on speaking terms since it stuck its claws in your ankle when someone pulled a Christmas cracker.
Sometimes you wish that the holiday would just finish. Then, you could get back to work on your production process where communication always works perfectly… or does it?
Just like a festive dinner table, things start to go wrong when cells don't talk to each other.
Cells that aren't talking properly can wreak havoc on your production process. For example, you might see:
The first effect you might notice is a drop in production. This is usually a sign that something in the process is not working properly and suggests that further investigation is needed.
When you start looking closer at the problem, you may see piles of work in progress building up at certain stages of the process. This can help you to locate the source of the problem.
Getting out of sync is the root of many communication problems, just as it is in your family meal! When your eight year old niece eats a whole box of chocolates and starts running around the house at 200 miles per hour, she's out of sync with everyone else — the adults are all collapsed with hunger because the meal is three hours late. When the food does finally arrive, the adults are all angry and your niece is crashed out on the floor after her sugar rush.
When your production cells get out of sync, the whole process starts to suffer.
Another sign that things are not working properly is when products are faulty and require a lot of reworking. This can happen, for example, when cells don't communicate accurate details of the product to the following cell.
The festive season is full of complaints: "I don't like turkey!" and "I only like turkey!" and "I would like turkey but I can't have any because grandad ate it all!"
Complaints are often a warning sign of failures of communication. In business, these complaints might come from customers — if the failures have caused delays or defects — or from team members working in other cells who can't do their jobs properly as a result of the failures.
Good communication is vital for any production process, but it's especially important when you are using robots. Unlike fully manual processes, robots can't tell you when something is going wrong… or can they?
Well actually, now they can! With robot monitoring software, like Insights, you can monitor the productivity of your robot in real time.
But, what are the signs that robots are not talking to each other?
Two methods of robot-robot communication are used for most of the setups we see at Robotiq. Let's imagine connecting two robots called Anja and Norman.
When there seems to be a breakdown of communication between the two robots, robot monitoring software helps you to troubleshoot.
In Insights, a failure in communication will show up differently depending on the communication method you are using.
Three common signs that robots have stopped talking to each other are:
Detecting the root of communication problems is only the start. Just like when your family is having a festive argument, first you need to find out why people are unhappy then you have to work to find a solution that everyone agrees on.
Once you have identified that communication is the issue with your robot, use Insights and your own problem solving abilities to work towards a solution.
You can try a free demo of the Insights platform right now! It uses data from our Insights Demo robot. Just go to insights.robotiq.com