Small company masters random bin picking with UR5 cobots and boosts output by 11 percent Jenny | Waltle lives and breathes the idea of Lean and the Kaizen philosophy, enabling short delivery times and high quality. With its optimized manufacturing operations, the supplier recently proved its strengths in the most challenging discipline of automation “bin picking”. Two cobots from Universal Robots pick randomly oriented parts from a box and feed a CNC mill – delivering greater process reliability, and a zero-fault production. All this was achieved despite the prevailing lack of skilled employees.

The business transformation

For the Austrian Company, that produces aluminum, metal and plastic parts, it’s quite difficult to find qualified labor. The Vorarlberg region has full employment. To continue growing, Jenny | Waltle needs to automate.

Having initially started with the use of a conventional industrial robot, the company quickly realized that it needed a more flexible solution. “As soon as small batch sizes are involved, simple operation is what really counts. This is the only way we can quickly modify a system to manage new orders. Performance is secondary,” explains Sebastian Schuler, Design Engineer at Jenny | Waltle.

The supplier’s CNC machine park handles batch sizes between 500 and 5000 units. “At Automatica 2016, we became aware of Universal Robots. The intuitive user guidance and the technology’s tremendous flexibility convinced us immediately,” recalls Waltle.