Griffin had seen Universal Robots at many trade shows. “They appeared to be simple to program, and even vendors who weren’t selling robotics were using these robots in their booths,” he recalls. “So that kind of told me, ‘Wow, this really is the most popular one.’” One of the reasons for the cobots’ widespread use is their built-in safety mechanisms that automatically stop the cobot arm when it encounters obstacles in its route. Once a risk assessment is performed, the cobots can then operate without safety caging. “Now I can have people work right next to the cobots without a bunch of caging,” says the operations director.

The task of assembling the knife sharpeners seemed like a logical place for Darex to start their automation project. “Traditionally we would have an operator with a pneumatic screw gun retrieving a screw from a screw presenter, sticking it into the machine, and driving it to torque—very monotonous, very ergonomically unfriendly work,” says Griffin. To alleviate the operators from this undesirable task, Darex chose the UR3 tabletop cobot. The company was able to keep the exact same setup with the screw presenter and the screw gun; the only thing that differed was the cobot now doing the task. Sam Jacobson, production engineering supervisor at Darex, recounts how operators would sometimes miss screw insertions as the holes in the housings were hard to see into. “The UR3 hits all the screws all the time and if not, it will immediately notify us,” he says. “We have definitely seen an increase in product quality due to the cobots.”

When Darex initially bought the cobots, the production supervisor was trying to think of ways to get the production team excited about having a robot amongst them. He also needed a dedicated staff member on the line to be the robot technician who could oversee all robot operations. “So I came up with this little competition,” says Griffin. “I gave everybody the UR Academy web address, told them to study up on this and invited them to compete for the job, using the knowledge from the Academy.” The UR Academyconsists of nine interactive, online modules that cover the basic UR cobot programming and setup. Darex held several rounds of contests where employees were required to program the cobots. The winner was 26-year-old Brittany Mohrman. “It was really exciting to get the opportunity to do something different, so I jumped right in, learned all I could, aiming to beat out the competition. The UR training taught me things like understanding different program cycles, adjusting waypoint changes, and knowing where the tool center point of gravity on the robot is. My job is definitely more interesting now.”