Manufacturing: Advanced Automated Manufacturing Solutions or Co-Bots

We know there are many cheap industry grippers on the market, but manufacturers today need more advanced technology centred on dexterous manipulation to pick up a range of objects and with more sensing capabilities.

Knowing these pain points, we created our Modular Grasper (an affordable, more robust 3-fingered smart grasper) to automate specific tasks within the manufacturing industry. The Modular Grasper intuitively grasps and manipulates objects of different sizes and shapes, without the need for reprogramming or deploying other robots. It has torque sensors and position sensors at each joint along with a total of 9 degrees of freedom (3 for each finger) making it ideal for grasping a range of products or items.

Key Tasks:

Rotating, turning
Pick and Place
Feeding through
Packing
Moving linearly

Key Benefits:

Speed up product development time
More operational hours
Improve quality
Reduce costs
Safeguarding workers from risky tasks
Minimise labour-intensive work
Free up time from workers to focus on more specialised tasks
Introduce data-driven results

In the following video taken at an exhibition, you can see the Modular Grasper picking up a range of items intuitively, from a plate to a pack of marbles, to a Pringles box! All of this in succession, without reprogramming or needing to deploy other robots.

For more intricate work, our Shadow Dexterous Hand (the most advanced human-like 5-fingered Dexterous Hand) would be your ideal tool as seen in this video.

Both our Shadow Dexterous Hand and our Modular Grasper can help to automate specific tasks to support industry 4.0.

Collaborative Manufacturing Projects:

Cognitively Enhanced Robot for Flexible Manufacturing of Metal and Composite Parts (COROMA)

The COROMA project developed a cognitively enhanced robot that can execute multiple tasks for the manufacturing of metal and composite parts. COROMA provides the flexibility that European metalworking and advanced material manufacturing companies require to compete in the rapidly evolving global market. It was here that Shadow developed the Modular Grasper (supported by the European Commission) and you can see it in action in the video below:

Smart Enabling Robotic Driving Free Form Welding (SERFOW)

The SERFOW project aimed to produce a flexible and dynamic free-form welding system (for the repair and manufacture of high-value aerospace and nuclear industry components) that can provide low-cost additive manufacturing support. The platform can identify individual parts using an advanced stereo camera system, which partners with a robotic arm and TIG welding set to produce an intelligent and flexible manufacturing platform. It showed that the repair and manufacture of high-value aerospace and nuclear industry components on short time scales, at low-cost, can be achievable. You can read more about the SERFOW project here.

If you’re looking to automate tasks in your company and would like to discuss how our technology could help, get in touch with us.