Material handling with collaborative robots
Rapid growth in e‑commerce and fulfillment continues to increase the demand for collaborative innovation. From bin picking to packaging and every step in between, material handling robots help streamline workflows while maintaining traceability and quality.
Fulfill manufacturing demands with cobot automation
Manufacturing and distribution demands are constantly growing. As materials and products move through warehouses, factory floors, and transportation lines, material handling robots offer a reliable and efficient way to protect items from damage while keeping operations moving.
Collaborative robots can handle repetitive material handling tasks across industries, which typically include loading and unloading parts, moving pieces from point A to B, stacking and destacking boxes, palletizing and depalletizing, and sorting. With precise and secure end‑of‑arm tooling, a material handling robot can grip products safely and repeatably while following defined transport routes. This frees up the time and energy of human workers, who can then spend their time in more skilled roles.
Material handling cobots in action
See how material handling robotics is already helping businesses streamline workflows and increase productivity - without compromising quality.
Free up skilled labor
Labman Automation is a UK technology company specializing in designing and manufacturing lab robotics. Collaborative robot arm UR3e was integrated into a powder dispensing platform to create an automated dosing platform, freeing up to 6 hours of manual experiment time from high-cost lab technicians. The cobot arm had changing gripper finger tips to pick and place vials, dosing heads, adapters, and more.
Increase production
IPTec, a South Korean manufacturer of ignition transformers, deployed two UR3 cobots in picking up and moving ignition transformers for soldering, inspection, and marking. Production was increased by 123%, while costs were reduced by approximately 8%. Defect rate was also limited to about 0%, providing consistent quality.
Achieve higher throughput
Chicago-area Napco Brands is a private-label business that focuses on roasting and packing coffee beans. The business employed two palletizing robots by UR to automate the packaging line, picking up boxes as they arrived on a conveyor. A 15% increase in throughput was observed, and manual labor was freed up for more skilled tasks.
Streamline your operations
Streamline your material handling, packaging and palletizing, bin picking, labeling and kitting operations with collaborative robots. Relieve workers from repetitive work and heavy lifting by automating material handling tasks with lightweight collaborative robot arms. Automation helps you combat the rising costs of new product packaging and shortened product life cycles, and makes it easy to keep up with seasonal peaks despite labor shortages.
Automate complex picking tasks
Cobots with innovative grippers, computer vision and machine-learning systems can pick up a wide range of objects even in unstructured environments such as a bins or totes. Easily integrated SKU scanning and the ability to pick up pouches or products of nearly any size or shape make e-commerce, fulfillment, warehousing, logistics and supply chain operations simpler, faster, and more efficient.
Speed up repetitive tasks
The UR robot’s intuitive, easy-to-program interface makes the arm perfect for small-volume applications as well as highly repetitive tasks. You can reprogram and redeploy the robot as needed across your operations. If your work flow changes, the material handling robotic arm can be deployed quickly and easily in new constellations due to its small size and lightweight design.
Are you ready to automate your business?
Talk to our cobot experts today to find a personalized solution for your business needs.
Complete your cobot
Our industrial collaborative robots reach their full potential through a strong ecosystem of add‑on products, and at Universal Robots we take great pride in this ecosystem, known as UR Marketplace.
Application kits
Application kits are useful for those who can install their own solution but are looking for a compatible set of end-effectors, software and other accessories
Components
Components are single products that can be combined with our UR robot to create an entire solution. This includes items such end-effectors, 7th axis, software or teach pendants.
Solutions
Palletizing solutions are flexible and easy to integrate and typically allow for variation in choice of gripper, number of pallets and integration of an optional lifting column for extra palletizing height.
Why Universal Robots?
Tried. Tested. Trusted.
Universal Robots has deployed over 100,000 cobots into every manufacturing industry. Companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 giants to local contract machine shops, are leveraging our 6th generation cobots to increase productivity and quality and improve job satisfaction for their manufacturing teams.
Flexible
UR cobots meet the demands for flexibility head-on with industry-leading ease-of-use, intuitive programming, and a powerful back-end for OEMs and developers to add value and meet specific needs. UR cobot-based systems generate ROI that is usually measured in months, not years.
Worker-safe, worker-friendly
Universal Robots has developed the most complete set of safety tools and functions in the industry. Our safety protocols can be configured to meet the varied safety requirements of your plant or facilities and your application risk assessment, letting your manufacturing team work safely side-by-side with UR cobots.
Get in touch with Universal Robots
Thousands of businesses rely on collaborative robots to…
- Increase productivity
- Adapt to changing product demand
- Improve employee well-being and retention
- Staff through labor shortages
