Go Fast Campers

An entrepreneur and avid off-road outdoorsman, Go Fast Camper founder, Wiley Davis, came up with his manufacturing business concept while driving home from a surfing and camping trip to Baja. After having struggled once more to fit his six-foot, four-inch frame into his six-foot truck bed to sleep, he envisioned what became Go Fast Campers (GFC), a manufacturer of customized, lightweight pop-up truck campers

GFC’s line of CNC-integrated UR cobots lets the company run four machine cells with a single operator. The company achieves about 22 hours per day of machine time, 6 hours of that unmanned with the cobot cells running lights-out.

For each part machined, the cobot, equipped with the UR+ certified force-feedback gripper from Robotiq, picks a piece of aluminum stock from a tray, sets it in a re-grip station to find the part’s center, and loads it into the machine.

Once the machine mills the first operation, the robot opens the door and flips the part to machine the second operation.

At the same time, the robot controller ejects the part out of the vise, and sends a retractor arm to pull the parts into a wash bin, ready for subsequent processes.

The UR cobot’s built-in I/Os allow GFC to control all of the auxiliary systems through the robot program. Stephan Morris, COO, says, “This has been incredibly useful for us, as we actuate the vise, the ejector mechanism, the extractor mechanism, the door cylinder that opens and closes the door—all those things are made possible by the UR’s easy programming language, and the easy opportunity to just plug in different pins to different pneumatic systems.”

With their experience in replicating successful, reliable, and fully integrated cobot-CNC machine cells, GFC is developing a new business to help other entrepreneurial companies start out of their garage with automation. Special projects team engineer Ian Sparkman says, “We’re trying to make the robot be a more sophisticated tool. Even though it is extremely easy to program, this means that the end user doesn’t have to do any programming. The parameters for a part no longer just contain the stock sizes and the part program number, but they also contain what sort of sequence of robot motions you need to make that particular part.”