Page 19 - AutomationNOTEBOOK volume 41

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I Robot, You Maintain
According to the cover story, a typical robot is designed to achieve more than 10 years of life with proper maintenance, says Jason Tsai, vice president, product development at Fanuc. "Maintenance items can include cable, sensors, mechanical drive components, electronic hardware, calibration and grease," he says. "Proper maintenance is critical to keep the machine functioning properly and avoid any premature component failure. For a high-throughput production factory, any machine breakdown could cause signifi-
Figure 3: (courtesy of Fanuc) Typical items on a robot requiring maintenance include cable, sensors, mechanical drive components and electronic hardware.
cant production downtime and profit loss, which can impact the business’ bottom line (Figure 3)."
Product reliability is a must-have requirement in production factories with robot automation, con- tinues Tsai. "If the machine is designed poorly with
low product reliability or safety design margin, the machine breakdown can cause production downtime and significant profit loss,” he says. "Therefore, proper maintenance and high product reliability are absolute- ly critical to maintain high production throughput and increase profitability."
Robots can present unique maintenance challenges. "They answer to the laws of physics,
but they can’t communicate that easily," says Sam Bouchard, CEO, Robotiq in the cover story. "An interface, whether it’s on a machine, in a robot teach pendant or coming from a monitoring software, allows us to know more about what’s going on with the equipment and taking the right actions to prevent problems and of course to improve production."
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Mastering Machine Maintenance
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Brain Teasers
"It may be basic to say that a broken machine can’t make parts, but oftentimes the fight that
maintenance has to deal with is its own plant management," says Daniel Moore, tech support manager, Universal Robots in the cover story. "Whether you’re talking about robotics or my past life in laser welding systems and automatic monitoring systems, if there’s a cause for repair, then you basically have two options: Do it right, carefully and slowly the first time, or guarantee another, worse failure."
Pressure on plants to produce parts right now often means that there is pressure to not do it right and leave the failure to another shift or another week, continues Moore. "Ultimately this is a horrible idea for any company, but it’s often the kind of thing I saw working on laser systems in automotive suppliers or in the auto shops themselves," he explains.
An Integrator’s Viewpoint
System integrators have experience with many different types of machines in a wide variety of production environments, giving them keen insights. "A best-practices design approach needs to be taken when specifying components in automation control panels, so that the selected parts are not operated at or near their design limits," says David Paul, engineering design manager at Maverick Technologies a member
Cover Story www.automationnotebook.com | Issue 41
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