MMTS was held last week in Montreal on May 16th to May 18th. This show specializes in machine tools, tooling, metalworking, automation, additive manufacturing, design and physical asset management solutions for manufacturing professionals. Robotiq Application Engineers were present at the Advanced Motion & Controls booth, one of our product distributor.
Even if this show is mainly oriented towards manufacturing, we were able to see this fresh automation and robotic wave.
Advanced Motion & Controls booth was very attractive for visitors as they had 2 demos running with Universal Robots (UR3 & UR5). The UR3 used the unlimited joint 6 rotation to demonstrate a screwing application. The UR5 had our Robotiq FT 300 and 2-Finger Gripper 85 installed and was demonstrating a pick and place application with various objects of different forms and sizes.
Amongst the curious who stopped by the booth to observe the robot moving without any fences, we noticed that collaborative robotics isn't much known in the province of Quebec. Some visitors did know that these robots are the ones that stop when you bump into them but that’s about it. Collaborative robotics seems to be in an early stage here in Quebec but more and more companies are showing interest in this technology.
If we can relate to our clients case studies, integrating collaborative robots into small and medium companies have a lot of benefits. Not only the integration is less expensive than usual automation system, but it is also simple to setup and program.
Machine tending is one of the applications we see the most up to now. In this video, you can see one of our client Genik that integrated the UR10 and a Robotiq Gripper to demonstrate this application. Notice how compliant and safe is the robot's arm when we interrupt his movements.
Universal Robots and Robotiq are a great package to start with if you have not used a robot before. Programming is simple and the solution is flexible so it can be applied to various applications. If you are interested in learning more about it and talk about potential applications at your plant, you can always reach out to our experts who will be glad to help!