That’s a common reaction in the furniture industry when manufacturers try to envision bringing robots into sanding and polishing applications. And you can’t blame them; when it comes to shaping a plank of wood into the back of a chair or finish sanding cabinet doors or a headboard, automation hasn’t been as common – until recently.
While traditional industrial robots that require safety guarding, complex programming, and high unit counts to justify automation are not an optimal fit here, we now increasingly see collaborative robots assist wood, furniture and cabinet manufacturers. As opposed to their larger cousins bolted down in cages, collaborative robots can be moved around between machines and processes just like any other tool in the cabinet shop.
Training on operations and programming is available 100% online from the UR Academy – in fact, Universal Robots has delivered online training to over 100,000 people around the world. No computer science degree is required!