— Robotic programmer, global manufacturer“We could be days into the programming process and realize we needed to redesign and start over. With Robotmaster, as soon as the design team sends us a new frame design, we can bring it into Robotmaster and see if it’s feasible.”
The company, a global leader in compact equipment, invested in automating its frame welding process to advance the industry.
They invested in a Yaskawa Motoman ArcWorld® robotic welding system to automate their frame welding process. The manual teach pendant programming method created a bottleneck in production, with the average frame taking 40 hours to program. This led to long programming time and robot downtime.
“Not only was programming long and tedious, and the robot out of production for five days while programmers were being taught, but it took a toll on my body. I needed to climb on the frame to program tight areas accurately while avoiding potential collisions.”
One of the company’s employees, a welder by trade interested in robotics, investigated better programming methods and discovered Robotmaster® offline programming software. Working with our local integrator partner Sofos Robotics, the company saw the immense value Robotmaster would bring to their facilities.
By switching from the teach pendant method to Robotmaster, programming could be done in a day instead of a week, and robot downtime decreased by 75%. This allowed the company to reduce production time and increase their robot’s productivity.
Investing in Robotmaster enabled the manufacturer to streamline their engineering and design processes.
“We spend much time going back and forth with the R&D and design teams. Sometimes, frames are designed in such a way that it’s impossible to reach a weld. But we didn’t find this out until we were trying to program it with the teach pendant. We could be days into the programming process and realize we needed to redesign and start over. With Robotmaster, as soon as the design team sends us a new frame design, we can bring it into Robotmaster and see if it’s feasible. Robotmaster has easy-to-use feasibility tools that consider the part, the robot model’s reach, and the tooling. This has drastically reduced the time we spend going back and forth and has improved our design-to-production process.”