CNC Trčka is a Czech manufacturer of smaller CNC tooled machinery components for aerospace, medical, automotive and other industries. Utilizing older lathe machines was greatly improved with the UR5 robot, saving space and reducing costs and time required with outside programming.
The company currently operates 20 CNC lathes and 6 mill cutting centers and needs to stay agile in managing variable manufacture-to-order projects.
“We have been automating production processes through robotic technologies for a while, says Michal Trčka, CTO at CNC Trčka. We started with traditional industrial robots, which needed external programming help. We selected a collaborative robot for particular applications because they don’t need as much space and safety caging. We were confident that using our experience and knowledge we could build a cobot production cell by ourselves.”
CNC Trčka searched for a cobot vendor and ultimately selected Universal Robots. The decision was made during a training session at UR offices in Prague, where their representatives were assured that they would be able to integrate the cobots without any external support.
UR cobots demonstrated that they do not need as much area and safety guarding compared with traditional robot cells. Another important aspect was that the company could easily integrate the cobots with their older machines in a much more flexible and easy way than using special loading robots integrated with tooling machines.
“As to the UR functionality itself, we were impressed by the simple application, a user-friendly interface, easy programming and immediate availability of the product enabling us to start the project whenever we wanted,” says Trčka.
After basic training at UR’s local office, the customer purchased its first UR5 and integrated it to a 30 year old tooling machine to insert raw material and remove it after a tooling process. Before, this process required non-stop supervision of an operator. Now, the new solution includes storage with 84 pieces of raw material, enough for 45 minutes of production. The operator only feeds the storage container, and checks for finished products, enabling him to supervise other CNC machines in the meantime.
Building the first application, including prototyping and integrating grippers and a stand, took about a month. Assembly itself and cobot programming took another week. The solution does not use PLC, just digital input and output of the cobot. After a tuning period and pilot production, the same layout will be applied to the other three machines on the shop floor.
ING. MICHAL TRČKA, CTO CNC TRČKAWe are doing business in a mixed production environment, where each order is unique requiring high production flexibility. On the other hand, an increasing customer demand is pushing us to increase productivity and deploy automation technologies. UR collaborative robots are the ideal solution enabling us to balance both requirements thanks to fast and flexible implementation, and intuitive control, freeing our staff from routine, manual work,
Previously, the CNC machine was operated by a human worker, now the UR5 cobot loads raw material from the gravitational storage into the CNC lathe, controls the machine function and opens and closes doors. Thanks to easy and intuitive programming, the company staff was able to build the application including a pneumatic gripper control without any previous experience besides a basic two-day training. The UR5 is the first robotic device in the company that works without safety cages (after a safety evaluation), which lowers total costs on technology and increases flexibility and work safety.
The main benefit of the Universal Robots technology in CNC Trčka has been automation of machine tending processes that increases work productivity. The need for a number of operators has been reduced and the customer also standardized the production cycle. In the future, the company management plans on deployment of UR5 cobots onto other CNC machines that will intensify productivity and ROI.
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