Are you robot ready?

Question 1 of 7: How well-defined and understood are your process input and output needs?

Question 2 of 7: What is the main abrasive application you would like to automate?

Question 3 of 7: How significant to your operation is the production time of the main process you would like to automate?

Question 4 of 7: How many abrasive steps do you perform on each part?

Question 5 of 7: How complex is the shape of your parts?
The more complex the part, the more difficult it will be for a robot to work with. Technologies like force control and vision systems make it possible to automate complex parts, but they will increase your upfront costs and make it more difficult to achieve your desired ROI.

Question 6 of 7: How tight are the dimensional tolerances of your current incoming parts?
Robots operate best on incoming parts with very tight dimensional tolerances. If the dimensional tolerances of your similar incoming parts have a wide range, your robotic cell may require more costly force control and vision technologies to operate correctly.

Question 7 of 7: How varied is your part mix?
In general, the more variety in your part mix, the more difficult it will be to achieve your automation productivity target. Plus, it can increase costs related to programming. The most difficult part mix to automate is a small quantity of many parts, and the easiest is a large quantity of the same part.