Cobot cycle times

Erik_Cornelsen 2019-07-04

hi all,

What are the fastest cycle times you have seen in collaborative robotics applications?
Is it possible to achieve for example a cycle in the order of few seconds?

Thanks,
Erik

matthewd92 2019-07-04

We had two robots in a cell, one was picking parts from a vibratory feeder table and placing in a chute, the second was using vision to find a hole in the part and then place them onto the tooling.

The robot picking them from the table averaged a 3 second pick to pick, the robot placing the parts averaged 3.2 seconds place to place.

We have a cell feeding a punch press, we run just under 5 seconds cycle time (get part from feeder, load die, pull pressed part out and place on outbound conveyor) and the press has a 800-1000 ms cycle time so we run somewhere between 5.6 to 5.8 seconds per part, 20+ hours per day.

We have a number of cells that run in the 6-11 second range per part. One of them that processes 4 parts every 42 seconds has produced parts for 23.9 hours in a single day. It generally puts in 140-150 hours a week, usually only going down when the injection mold is not running. I’m that time it picks the part up, uses a labeling machine to accurately apply a label and packages the part for shipment to the OEM.

These are just just a few examples of cells we have at customer sites.

Loïc 2019-07-05

It depends on what you're calling "collaborative robotics applications".

I have several applications where I reach almost the same cycle time as Matthew, but there is no interactions between the cobots and the humans.

I have one application where there is a mutual zone. Someone place the parts in a specific position and when the area is free the cobot come to take the different parts and place the finished product. This application is quite complex and the cycle time is around 25s.

But I have no feedback about an application with a real interaction between human and cobot. For this kind of application, the risk analysis will tell you what to do and cycle time should be your last worry. And for the moment, I have no client who were interested in this kind of application...

matthewd92 2019-07-05

I agree with @"Loïc" in that those times are not “collaborative” as in human/robot interaction and they are also all fully behind safety systems, generally laser area scanners.

The applications where we are having human robot cooperation the cycle times are much slower and the tasks can be complex or just long. One example is the human takes about 30 seconds to fixture 5 pieces and then the robot installs over 100 rivets, total cycle time is just under 9 minutes. Each rivet though averages less than 6 seconds taking away a mundane task from the human and performing that task faster than the human does on average by a considerable amount.

Erik_Cornelsen 2019-07-05

Thanks for the replies @matthewd92 and @Loïc. I think you covered the extreme cases of collaborative robotics applications, the one with Power/Force limiting and the other with safety-rated monitored stop. It also helped us to frame some cycle times for real case applications.