Mid Atlantic Machinery Automation Tackles Remote Control Challenges with Olis Connect
The Customer
Mid Atlantic Machinery has provided manufacturers and fabricators with sophisticated fabrication and machine tooling technology, integration expertise, and applications engineering services for over three decades. The team’s mission is to make automation accessible and cost-effective for businesses of all sizes.
Located in Harrisburg, PA, the company represents major equipment brands, such as Universal Robots, throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic region all the way down the east coast.
The Business Challenge
One of the many metal fabrication machine tools that Mid Atlantic Machinery sells are press brakes, which are machines used for bending and forming sheet metal multiple times until the desired part is achieved.
The main challenge in automating such a machine is the interaction between the machine and the operator. As the metal sheets are bent, the operator needs to follow the bends and may need to rotate the part multiple times. This part manipulation in real-time needs certain feedback between the operator and machine. These different challenges make it complex to integrate a robot to tend a press brake machine.
However, despite these technical challenges, the labor shortage is forcing manufacturers to find solutions to fill their open operator positions. Their production lead times and ability to accept new contracts are being compromised.
Over the past few years and based on evolving customer needs, the team at Mid Atlantic Machinery’s new division, Mid Atlantic Machinery Automation (MAMA), developed a UR10E Press Brake Operator Package.
Their unique expertise in the metal forming process helped them to develop a solution made for press brake applications. This type of robot tending solution is unprecedented on the market.
Moreover, their solution allows manufacturers to redeploy their robot to another application if needed. This gives them more flexibility to make the most of their investment if the production would vary on their press brakes.
One of the unique aspects of the solution is that it can be operated both robotically and manually, depending upon the required part volume of the job at hand. In addition, the solution features Mid Atlantic Machinery’s proprietary machine interface that enables customers to use their UR10E robots with nearly any machine tool and safety configuration. The solution also includes two patent-pending gripping systems that can be tailored to a wide variety of different-sized parts and cover 80% of customer needs.
As an integrator that provides post-sale technical support, MAMA initially used a remote monitoring product that enabled the team to detect issues with their customers’ press brakes.
However, to troubleshoot and fix most of the problems, engineers had to travel to the customers’ plants, which represented high costs in terms of person-hours, accommodations, flights, etc. Moreover, the expensive and inefficient downtimes meant that customers could not deliver their contracts on time.
The Solution
Always on the lookout for ingenious solutions, MAMA discovered Olis® Connect, Olis Robotics plug-and-play product that ensures not only remote monitoring of Universal Robots but also remote error recovery.
Remote error recovery means customers and MAMA experts don’t just log into the application to see what is happening and determine if the robot is working properly, has an issue, or has stopped altogether. Remote error recovery means users can log in and get the robot back to work, minimizing as many downtimes as possible.
Olis Connect is perfect for all types of unattended operations, including machine tending, assembly, material removal, and much more. It only requires 3 USB cameras for live video feeds and a reliable network access of at least 3Mbit. Olis Connect also enables users to control a robot and start it up from anywhere worldwide using an intuitive browser-based interface.
The Results
MAMA’s Vice President and Co-Founder, Joshua Mayse, was thrilled to have found Olis Connect. “Robot recovery is something that our customers are looking for, and Olis Connect has many features that other solutions simply don’t have,” he said. “We ended up ditching our other remote monitoring solution and went all in with Olis”
Olis Connect can be installed in just minutes. No robotics engineers or programmers are required to use the application either.
A typical and traditional problem with robots was that if it stalled or another issue arose, experts would have to travel on-site to fix it. Not anymore, thanks to Olis Connect.
“Many times, we can fix a problem for our customers in mere minutes at no cost. With the cameras, we see what is going on. We can restart their robots from our iPad in just a few clicks. Customers end up wasting less time and consumables because the problem is fixed immediately,” he added. “Production can start up again much faster to maintain throughput.”
Joshua points out that for today’s manufacturers and fabricators, the adage “time is money” is ever-increasingly relevant—and Olis Connect saves massive amounts of time and costs with managing robots. “I think it is the best product I have seen on the market for Universal Robots,” Joshua explained. “It adds tremendous value to the overall effectiveness of robotic applications.”