In advanced manufacturing, deviations in a robot’s pose or path can lead to production issues and place pressure on engineering teams. INSPHERE, provider of intelligent automation solutions, offers advice on maintaining precision in demanding manufacturing environments.
Industrial robots can be highly productive, but thermal variation, mechanical wear and payload differences all contribute to positional drift. Such drift often goes undetected until it begins to affect quality outcomes.
This creates a persistent challenge for engineers: how to ensure that a system designed for precision continues to perform as expected throughout its operational lifecycle.
LIMITATIONS OF ESTABLISHED PRACTICES
Traditional approaches such as periodic calibration and downstream inspection remain widely used. However, these are lagging indicators, which rely on the assumption that performance remains stable between interventions.
By the time deviations are identified through inspection processes, the impact has often already been felt in the form of scrap, rework or disruption to production schedules.
A SHIFT IN APPROACH
A more continuous, proactive approach is required. Advances in metrology and control systems can monitor robot performance in real-time, within the production environment itself, rather than relying solely on periodic validation.
FROM MONITORING TO CONTROL
Once deviations have been identified, it essential that they are corrected.
Robot control software platforms such as ORA TM are designed to take measurement data and compare it against intended robot behaviour. This enables the creation of a live digital representation of the process, highlighting any deviation from expected performance. ORA provides in-process improvements through a highly intuitive user interface.
Where appropriate, corrective action can be applied during operation, reducing the likelihood of a deviation progressing into a quality issue.
ADAPTABLE IN-PROCESS CONTROL
ORA’s sensor agnostic feature gives manufacturers the opportunity to integrate into any existing robot cell and benefit from 24/7 monitoring and in-process adjustments, without manual intervention.
Measurement sensors gather all positional data from a robot cell, which is transferred to ORA and compared to the desired robot path. A digital twin allows users to view frames and their associated CAD models in real time. If deviations are identified, the positional revisions are fed back to the robots, allowing corrections to be made in-process, thereby avoiding production errors.
SUPPORTING CONSISTENCY AT SCALE
For production managers, the benefit of continually measuring activity and correcting deviation in-process lies in improved consistency. By achieving more accurate and reliable automated processes, manufacturers can benefit from fewer quality issues and improved throughput, with reduced waste and downtime.
