Simple to Complex - Robotics: Importance of Experience and How We Can Automate

Wade Anderson:

Hey, manufacturing world. Welcome to another episode of Shop Matters, sponsored by Okuma America. This podcast is designed to talk about all things manufacturing related. Joining me today in the studio, I've got an old friend, John Tuohy with FANUC America, and Dave Baldetti with Gosiger Automation. Welcome guys.

John Tuohy:

Welcome Wade, thank you very much for having me again.

Dave Baldetti:

Yeah, it's good to be here.

Wade Anderson:

All right. So John, I got to share kind of a funny story, or to me it's a funny story, about you and why it's cool to know a lot of people in the industry in different parts of the country, but I don't know if you remember, but I had to move my father back home with us from Arizona, out to South Carolina. And me and my brother went out and he was driving a U-Haul and I was driving my dad's car with my son, one of his friends. And driving along, going through New Mexico and you call me and we're just shooting the breeze.

Wade Anderson:

And you want to know what I was doing. You could tell I was on the road. And I said, "I am driving through New Mexico at the moment. And you wanted to know how things were going." I said, "Actually, my eyes are bothering me a little bit. I've got this really bad bloodshot eye going on and just feels like somebody punched me." And like, "Dude, my dad and brother are eye doctors. Shoot me a picture."

Wade Anderson:

So I sent a picture to you, you actually got me in contact with your brother who troubleshot my bad eye going down the road at 85 miles an hour, and told me basically to stop trying to be a hero and drive all the way by myself and let my son drive for a while.

John Tuohy:

Yeah, it was good that he could help diagnose your issue as you're driving down the expressway. I was happy we could help.

Wade Anderson:

Anytime I think of FANUC, that always pops in my head.

Dave Baldetti:

You've come a long way from your bull riding days, back when you were a kid. It used to be when you got there, that was the dangerous part, not the way down.

Wade Anderson:

Right. Yeah, isn't that sad? I spent all those years driving on road trips and now I can't do a simple road trip without something going wrong. I guess getting old is not for the faint of heart, right?

John Tuohy:

I have to stop every two hours when I take a road trip, so I feel your pain.

Wade Anderson:

So guys, let's introduce each other. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Dave, let's start with you.

John Tuohy:

Okay. My name is David Baldetti. As Wade mentioned, I work for Gosiger Automation, but I've really been with Gosiger for 20 years now. The first 15 or so years spent a lot of time in our metal cutting group, doing turnkeys around North America.

Wade Anderson:

That's when I first met you. It was on a big turnkey project.

Dave Baldetti:

That's right. I went all around, did a lot of things, a lot automotive in particular, but aerospace and other things too, really learning the machine tool world, metal cutting, manufacturing. And so got my really kind of core of understanding that in those years. And then the last five years I've been in Gosiger Automation which is a division within Gosiger that focused entirely on industrial automation, loading and unloading, primarily machine tool applications.

Dave Baldetti:

And so, I think we're experts on how to make parts. And also now, how to load, unload those machine tools.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. That's something, John, I think about the 15 years or so of making parts and the knowledge base that you learned from that and how to be able to apply that now from an automation standpoint. It's one thing to go in and look at things as just an automation expert, but to have that expertise of being able to do turnkeys and know what it actually takes to take raw material and ship out good parts has to be a huge benefit.

John Tuohy:

Mm-hmm. First of all, thank you very much for having me again. I truly appreciate this and I'm honored to be sitting here with you guys to discuss some of these topics.

Wade Anderson:

Tell us a little bit about your background, John?

John Tuohy:

So my background, I've been rooted in automation for about the last 25 years. I spent my first years with... About 20 years with Schunk, where I concentrated heavily on the automotive, and eventually just the robot companies were my last four or five years, where I dealt with just robot companies.

John Tuohy:

And finally, FANUC came knocking on the door and IMTS 2016. And Lou Finazzo approached me and said, "It's time you work for me." The decision was made in a millisecond and I was able to join the FANUC team. Today, my role is the National Account Manager in the ASI group, where I focus on machine tending and working on customers to develop the configurations from the machine tool to the robot.

John Tuohy:

So we have partners such as Gosiger Automation that are very, very big partners in our network. And I'm again, honored to be here to talk about this with you guys.

Wade Anderson:

Very cool. So Dave, tell me a little bit about some of the type of projects that you got involved with from the automation standpoint? How did you get started or how did Gosiger Automation get started?

Dave Baldetti:

Well, good question. Our origin was the guy who wanted to make a 1,000,000 of something. And so it was these big players, big projects, all custom and it's the easy place, easiest place to justify automation. And where we are loading the same part over and over again, it required very little as far as a high technology that is now available on robots and other things.

Wade Anderson:

Which the bulk of your territory, the Gosiger trading ground is in the automotive market, right? Indiana, Michigan.

Dave Baldetti:

We're out of Dayton, Ohio, but we cover, like you mentioned, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, big time automotive country. And so, these are the low-hanging fruit, if you will, of automotive opportunities, where you have some part that's going to be made in the millions or in that area. And it's going to be one or two parts over and over again. And so that's where we started out, and that was where automation kind of lived for... I would say in the 80's, 90's and maybe even early 2000's.

Dave Baldetti:

But over time, we've started as technology became more available, in particular with vision applications or functions on the robot like torque skip. We were able to move into the mid-level customers who had mid-level volumes, medium volumes, running lot sizes of 200, 300, 400 parts, in a fairly broad mix. And we were able to pull that off, again by utilizing vision. So we didn't have to nest parts, not as much hard tooling, create some flexibility.

Dave Baldetti:

But still, we weren’t a candidate to offer much to the smaller job shops that run volumes of 50, 20, 40 parts with huge variety of parts. They don't even know what they're going to make next month, much less six months from now. So that's what the trend is now, is they had the same problems that the big players have with high volumes. This is the small shops, they can't get the workers or they just want to be more efficient, more productive.

Dave Baldetti:

And so, we've been really focused on those small job shop opportunities, and really the key, I think is creating simple to use, very affordable and really good return on investment applications like our AWR product line. So that's where we're putting a lot of effort these days.

Wade Anderson:

So tell us AWR, what is AWR?

Dave Baldetti:

So AWR stands for Automation Within Reach, and what it is really is simple automation, primarily focused to load lathes or machine tools. And it's for the small player who runs... He might only have two, three, five, 10 pieces of equipment, and he has large mix, but small volumes. So we have a couple of products. We have a drawer cell, we have a rotary cell and we have what we call VBX, any case.

Dave Baldetti:

We custom did all the design so that they're kind of out of the box solutions. They don't do everything, but they do what most people require. They pick parts, load them to lathes, unload them. They can do some blow offs, those kinds of things, but they're out of the box, built tp stock and very affordable.

Dave Baldetti:

And the key, at least to us, is that they're very flexible and easy to use, no teach pendant or robot programming skills required. We wanted somebody to be able to walk up, who has any comfort level on the machine tool and be more comfortable with our automation. And so it has an HMI that walks the operator through how to set a part, has automatic recoveries, as much as can be done, that's intuitive as possible.

Dave Baldetti:

We feel like there's nobody who can run a CNC machine that won't be comfortable running one of our Load & Go’s.

Wade Anderson:

And John, I think that's something that I know you and I have talked about in the past, knowledge has a shelf life, right? So you can work, you get to a certain point where you've got a large set of knowledge, and you think that's meaningful. And it is for a short period of time but eventually, technology will overtake that if you don't continually improve your skillset, improve your knowledge base, technology will pass you by and that knowledge level is no longer as valuable as it once was.

Wade Anderson:

So I think it's interesting as we see technology like this grow, I think back to 20 years ago when I used to teach robots. To your point, I held a teach pendant. I had to teach each and every move that, that robot made to get in and out of the machine and how to load parts, and things of that nature. And utilizing the technology that's available now and the connectivity and the simplicity of it. Now skillsets like what I once had on the shop floor isn't really needed, right? So I can put a Load & Go system in and within four hour have a machine loading parts, and it's all conversational windows.

Dave Baldetti:

That's right. The biggest obstacle, and when you're selling automation to a customer, oftentimes they're afraid of it. They don't want to create a problem where their employees, don't want to run it or don't know how to run it. And so, we've tried to make it easy and I think we've pulled that off.

Dave Baldetti:

So really, anybody can go up and enter basic information, part diameters, OD clamping them, ID clamping, and then make it run.

Wade Anderson:

Right. Embracing the technology, right?

John Tuohy:

Yeah, and echoing Dave's statements, when automation was really coming out in the 80s and the automotive was pretty much the first one to deploy it in mass, it was dedicated automation where the robot would do one job, probably for the life of that machine. Today, automation has to be much more flexible to address the concerns that Dave brought up in terms of high volume and low mix, or low mix and high volume.

John Tuohy:

Either way, the robot has to be able to adapt. And the technologies today and the software available to the robot makes it much more palatable and also cost-effective to get involved in those high mix, low volume applications for the job shop level. One of the challenging things we've been facing in the industry though is a lot of marketing is going out that is trying to portray robots as easy.

John Tuohy:

So all of the robot manufacturers are quickly scrambling to develop ease of use interfaces to appease the market base that wants to make a robot easy. But one thing I would like to remind everybody, a cobot, an under 10 kilogram machine that's inherently safe because it's force and power limited by design, that's one type of automation.

John Tuohy:

But the marketing that goes along with it has also convinced the industry that robots are safe and easy, and in many cases that can be dangerous and inherently just a bad idea to practice. You want to make sure that safeties are always taken care of, your interlocks and your machine is safe. And then when the operator enters a workspace, that either the robot is aware of it, or the robot has done a soft e-stop and shut down.

John Tuohy:

And then secondly, you want to make sure that this robot, once it's safe, it's being used and applied properly. And using an integrator such as Gosiger Automation, you get a depth and breadth of knowledge along with that purchase of just an AWR. They have, as Dave was saying, 20 years’ experience just sitting next to me and robotic automation. So the importance of a robotic integrator and developing and taking advantage of the technologies is in my opinion, paramount.

John Tuohy:

Moving forward, a lot of people say that, "I don't need an integrator. I've been watching these YouTube videos and it's real easy to put the robot. The robot even opens the door." Holy cow. Well, the minute that person asks, "Can I?" You need a robotic integrator. "Can I put a camera? Can I put a conveyor? Can I, can I, can I?" And the minute that you ask yourself, "Can I?" Call Gosiger.

Wade Anderson:

Right. The, "Can I's," are great. I like that big smile Dave's got. The "Can I's," are great tools, right? "Can I do this?" You never want to get pigeonholed into a situation where you say, "Well, we're making it this way because this is the way we've always made it." If you make that statement, then there's meat on the bone. There're ways to improve what you've been doing, because again, technology is continuing to push the limits even from a cutting tool standpoint, right?

Wade Anderson:

So you're not embracing the technology, you're going to wind up getting left behind. So you've got to continue to push the limits. So the, "Can I's?" You want to encourage that, you want to encourage people to go, "Man, I wonder, can I make this robot do this one special thing?" And the chances are absolutely.

John Tuohy:

Yeah, and if you look at where we sit...

Wade Anderson:

Now, how do we do it?

John Tuohy:

Yeah. And if you look where we sit Wade, you with Okuma, me with FANUC, Dave with Gosiger Automation. Okuma and FANUC have amazing technology.

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm.

John Tuohy:

Gosiger brings it together and creates a synergy between the technology of those two companies. And this is something you'll find with a robotic integrator in all applications. So as you sit in your office, deciding if you're going to automate a machine tool, one of the first things you should be deciding is which integrator you're going to select? There are opportunities, and there are possibilities that you can self-integrate.

John Tuohy:

But in many instances, and maybe Dave can expand on an example, that when you went out to deploy a piece of automation, it didn't work. All that money and time is spent when you could have contacted somebody to do this for you and draw on their experience. I don't know if Dave has any story he could recant.

Dave Baldetti:

Sure. Our Load & Go products, AWR products are intended to be finished, polished products. And we appreciate the ease of use that builders have developed in their products, but there's a lot more that goes into an automated solution than just easy-to-program robot. There are all kinds of things that inherently create a robust process that makes the process able to be automated and run consistently for long periods of time untended.

Dave Baldetti:

And we've just learned these things over the course of 20 years, things like tool life control that Okuma offers, that needs to be turned on and operated. And the other things the operator might do, like blow off the fixture or identify parts that are out of spec, too long, too short, that aren't right, organize the pick so that way we have consistent picking, those kinds of things.

Dave Baldetti:

And so, that's what we offer. I think there's a big difference between picking a part up and loading three in a row, or something like this, and picking a part up and loading it for hours on end, days on end, weeks on end, 24/7, lights out. And those are the things that we've gotten good at. One of the things we offer, I think just kind of the side part of any AWR opportunity, is a checklist of things to look for so that when we arrive, it's ready to be automated.

Dave Baldetti:

And those are things like I mentioned, tool life management is turned on and working, and we're not relying on an operator to hear chatter or something developing in the process that might go wrong.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Dave Baldetti:

Because nobody wants to come in, in the morning and find out that we made parts all night long, but they're all bad.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Dave Baldetti:

And there's countless other things. Of course the interface, we have developed interfaces over years, and so we know that they're safe and robust. And just getting a robot to open a door and push cycle start is not the same thing as having a safe and robust process, because sooner or later, you're going to find out that the machine tool and robot didn't interact well and somebody is unhappy.

Dave Baldetti:

So I think that those are the kinds of things we bring to the table, that DIYer might not know.

Wade Anderson:

Right. I know Greg [Feix] used to say that with automation, we make a lot of parts. Now we can make parts good or make parts bad, and the process ahead of that stream is what's going to determine that and how do you catch it? So those are all good points, and those are life lessons that I kind of bring back to your previous experience of spending 15 years as an engineer, designing processes on how to make parts, plays a huge advantage on, okay, now how do we automate that process?

Wade Anderson:

So you have to know how to make good parts and make them consistently to be able to automate it so that your automation is sound and bulletproof.

Dave Baldetti:

Yeah. Just moving the part from point A to point B is probably the easy part.

Wade Anderson:

That's the simple part, right?

Dave Baldetti:

That's the easy part. Doing it, knowing what kind of proper work holding we should have, that is robust enough to handle variations, and slugs or saw cut parts, or castings and forgings. And what kind of metal cutting process includes the proper blow offs or wash offs, or tool life monitoring, or whatever's required, is that when you walk away, you can be sure when you come back hours later, or days later, that it's still running.

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm. Now the Load & Go, as we talk about having something that is robust and capable in being able to monitor what's taking place in your manufacturing process. I know you guys are doing some things with cameras now, correct?

Dave Baldetti:

Sure. We have a couple things. We install an eWON unit, which allows us to interrogate remotely, any time the inputs and outputs that are going on. So if something's happening that is odd or bizarre, we can look at it remotely anytime, and potentially create a fix. And then also we install on our systems a camera and as much as anything else, it's a tool for the customer to check and see that his unit's running when he's out, right?

Dave Baldetti:

So as much as we can, we want to have customers have untended times, particularly on untended shifts, off shifts, nights and weekends. And so they can monitor just, "Where am I at in my queue? Am I getting near the end of my queue? And I should send somebody into putting new raw parts in and replace them, move the finished parts out? Or is there a fault for some reason or other?"

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm.

Dave Baldetti:

I think I mentioned that we found an unusual scenario at a customer in Iowa as it turned out, where they would run great. All day long, they'd run and they had no faults, the robot just never stopped. And then they had set it up to run overnight and they'd come in and inevitably in the morning, they find that it stopped at some point in the middle of the night and did not know why.

Dave Baldetti:

And so, we did all manner of trying to figure out what happened and ultimately sent somebody out on site. And we found that... So I should lead, all our Load & Go’s are guarded with an area scanner. It allows great ergonomics. It just allows me to walk in, it interrupts a light curtain, and then you can reset that start. So it's a safety mechanism that's RIA certified, but very user-friendly.

Dave Baldetti:

However, apparently it's prone to have an insect or moth as in this case, interrupt that. So what was happening with this customer was they'd turn everything off at night, except for the controller of the load-and-go, and they would open a door in the back because they wanted to keep the shop cool. And moths would fly in and they'd be attracted to the light of the...

Wade Anderson:

Attracted to the control light?

Dave Baldetti:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

Oh my gosh.

Dave Baldetti:

And they were just floating around and large enough that our area scanner would detect them and alarm out for a safety situation. And so it wasn't until we saw it firsthand, and then we just changed some settings on the area scanner and away we went. But that was one of those things that I think you learn and move on.

Wade Anderson:

Who would have believed production was stopped by a moth?

John Tuohy:

A true form of a collaboration right there, a collaborative robot. So actually in this scenario that that Dave has suggested or described, that robot is actually collaborative. It is a form of collaboration called speed and separation monitoring. So in the Load & Go cell, they do have an area scanner so that if an operator walks into this area, the robot is well aware of his presence.

John Tuohy:

And if he enters zone one, the robot will decrease its velocity by 50%. If they enter the working area of the robot, the robot will do a soft e-stop until that person is removed from the zone.

Dave Baldetti:

Or moth.

John Tuohy:

Or moth in this case. But the beautiful thing about it, is it's what Gosiger is able to do using other forms of collaboration, and he referenced the RIA specifications. In this case, it's 15066T one, two and three. They address the types of forms of collaboration and speed and separation monitoring in which the Load & Go definitely exemplifies, is that form of collaborative.

John Tuohy:

So when customers go out and say, "We want a collaborative robot," well, they have in their mind what they think a collaborative robot is. But what a collaborative robot really is, is something that's force and power limited, speeds and separation monitoring, hand guidance. And there's one other form that right now is escaping me off the top of my head, but as long as you meet one of these classifications, which Gosiger does, you have a collaborative robot and can also, many companies have initiatives to deploy collaborative robots.

John Tuohy:

Educating our customer base on what collaborative robots truly are, I think is also very important. When we look at a company that wants to put a big, big robot but doesn't want to put fencing. We can still make that big robot collaborative, whether it's Gosiger does it or another one of our partners. So educating our customer base on what collaboration truly is, I think will help us in the long run, deploy the automation properly, because today in the collaborative space, I saw a statistic from the RIA and I don't want to quote a number that is not accurate, but it was a very low number of actual robots that are deployed in actual collaborative applications.

John Tuohy:

Most robots today are deployed in applications that were sold as an ease-of-use, not collaborative.

Wade Anderson:

Very interesting.

Dave Baldetti:

Yeah. We think we've been selling collaborative solutions for years. And what I mean by that is what we're trying to do is create an automated solution where the operator can intervene when he's needed to do so. And oftentimes there are those scenarios, we'll say a tool change or part change over. And so we've created fencing scenarios where if we have a robot servicing two machines, we'll allow you to go in and change tools with one machine while the robot is running the other machine.

Dave Baldetti:

And so I would call these... These are forms of collaboration in a sense that we're allowing the human to do the things he needs to do and be safe and the robot to continue running automatically. So we've done that with fencing, we've done that with light curtains. We've done that with area scanners. We'll do that with real collaborative robots, but creating scenarios where we can run automation safely and have the operator do his things. That's what we've been doing for some time.

John Tuohy:

And as I sit here, that fourth form of collaboration was safety rated stop. Sorry that slipped my mind a moment ago. I hate that when it pops in your head and you're like, "Oh, damn, I tried."

Wade Anderson:

I'm just impressed how fast you're able to rattle through all those specs.

John Tuohy:

Yes.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, I think the safety aspect, that's an interesting talking point all to itself on having the experience levels needed to be able to safely have the correct environment for the automation to go in. I recall several years ago, it was probably IMTS maybe '06, somewhere in that timeframe, we brought a grinder in. And Mark Eddy was involved back then and designed a really neat clamshell style front door. It was super fast. Only a piece of the door would open up in a clamshell style. The robot would reach in, get the parts in and out. And it was lightning fast, how the whole system worked, it was amazing.

Wade Anderson:

And that worked well for most of the markets in the United States, but a customer in Canada bought that system and sent the machine. You probably remember this, Dave?

Dave Baldetti:

I do.

Wade Anderson:

Sent the machine up to Canada and the CSA guys go in to inspect, and like, "You can't have a door like that up here." It turns out that clamshell style door presents a pinch point problem. So even though it was meant to be an automated solution, nobody was really thinking to the point of, "Hey, there could be an instant where that door is opened, something stops and a guy goes to reach in and that door could close. Now he's got a pinch point."

Wade Anderson:

That's a hard lesson learned, right? We had to scrap, very unique, very cool door that was custom built for that scenario. We had to throw it in the trash can, start over and put the old traditional auto door mechanism on it that slid left to right, and had rubber safety switches and things like that. But those are lessons learned that you need to rely on the expertise of the people who have been there, done that, have the battle scars to prove it, and you're not reliving and relearning those lessons over and over.

John Tuohy:

Very true. If you look at the situation where robots are deployed inappropriately, the satisfaction levels just fall through the floor. An integrator will always bring their level of expertise, and in this case with Dave, we've got 20 years of expertise. And I'm not exactly sure how long the Okuma-Gosiger relationship has been in place.

Wade Anderson:

About 35.

John Tuohy:

35 years. So they've got 35 years of experience with the Okuma machines and the Okuma platforms. It would be foolish to not talk to them if you're going to deploy automation on an Okuma machine. That should be your first step, the mindset of contact Gosiger, or contact your integrator to make sure you don't waste time and money down the road.

Wade Anderson:

Right. I think of some of the employees that Gosiger Automation's got, guys like Dave Baldetti and even Jimmy Brown. We have people who are OSP experts that reach out to Jimmy to pick his brain on things, because he is so entrenched and has such an in-depth knowledge on everything, from how the APIs work, not only on the Okuma, but all the different, various peripheral devices that you typically wind up interfacing with at some point in an automated solution.

John Tuohy:

Yeah. Even in a job shop. If you think about a job shop that has 10 machines, he may have 10 different manufacturers. Well, mapping that robot to that PMC in a true integration is not an easy task. An integrator has those experiences, but if your intent is just to plop a robot and let it open a door and hit a cycle start button, it'll work for a while, but that's not a true robot integration.

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm.

Dave Baldetti:

Yeah. To be honest, we don't even think about those things anymore because it's so second nature to us. We've been just doing it for so long and so I don't know how many Okuma's we've put a robot in front of but if it's not 1,000, it's in the many hundreds. And so, all our guys can do it, and we're very comfortable with it and how it works. And it's second nature to us, I guess.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. I always liked the famous line, Craig Cottrell says a lot when customers come up and they have a question about something. He'll always start, "Yes. Now what's your question?" There's a way to do it. There's experience level out there, there's openness of the control, and there's so many different engineered solutions that we've come across over the years. Chances are whatever your unique situation is, that you think you're the only guy that's ever experienced it, chances are we've experienced it in different areas.

Wade Anderson:

It might not be the exact same scenario, but it's close enough. We can draw off those experiences to develop custom solutions for you.

John Tuohy:

And the robotic integrator is going to be the one that's going to have that experience to provide those solutions. As you sit here with the Okuma and me with FANUC, we're again, two great companies on their own. But if we were going to try to work together to do direct integration, we would be missing all of the experience that Gosiger has brought to the table for the past 35 years.

John Tuohy:

So whether you're new at this, or whether you've got 35 years of experience, drawing on the experience from a robotic integrator will only benefit your bottom line.

Wade Anderson:

Yep. Guys, any topics that I might've missed? Any key things you want to bring up?

Dave Baldetti:

I don't know. I would say that one of the evolutions, you mentioned new developments going on, and one of the things I think it is, is I've kind of said it before, but I'll say it a little differently this time, is previously everything we did was a custom project, right?

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Dave Baldetti:

So Wade Anderson would call me and say, "I want to do this. And I want to do that, and I have this contract." And we could build and still can, anything you can imagine, and there're costs to that. That's fine, we can do all that stuff. And so now we're moving towards standard products that can be customized to fit your needs. So if I make a comparison in the old days, we were building custom cars like they did in the early 1900s.

Dave Baldetti:

And today, you're going into the shop or to the car dealership and you're picking a car you want, and you customize it to have the features you need. And so that allows us to take the advantages of building in volume, amortizing engineering and experience over years, and getting the everyday man automation like Henry Ford did on the Model T. That's where I think we're heading. At least we're heading that way, and I think we'll get there.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent.

John Tuohy:

From the FANUC perspective of course, we've released our new CRX collaborative robot. We also have some software coming down that's going to address some of the ease of use and interfaces from the robot to a FANUC controlled machine. Those will be probably be released within the next quarter. Some of these ease of use features could actually include programming the robot in G-code as it sits next to the machine tool. And this will apply to not just our CRX robot, but to any robot in the FANUC family.

John Tuohy:

So moving forward, the idea to put the right robot in front of the machine tool with ease of use functions, potentially programmed in G-code, so the operator isn’t intimidated and doesn't think that this thing's here to re replace his job, it's here to augment it. So those are many of the initiatives that we're going to be pushing forward in '21. But I have to ask you, what does Okuma have coming down the road in 2021?

Wade Anderson:

We got a lot of great stuff. So we're doing a lot more work with technology from the double column standpoint. So we do a lot with surfacing. Our new hyper surface features is something that we're just scratching the surface on with the mold and dye applications. And we've got a new machine coming out that is targeting the semiconductor industry, but that same machine has got all the features and functions, and hyper surfacing, and everything to target my mold and die type industries as well.

Wade Anderson:

And then obviously, the automation aspect, pretty much all new Okuma machines are designed with automation in mind. So I think we made big strides with the design and implementation on the MU 5-axis machines, with a simple thing of taking basically the same construction, turning the trunnion 90 degrees. And I think Dave brought it up about having an operator to have access and being able to interface with the machine. With that MU with the trunnion turn, all the robots, all the APCs, FMS systems, anything you want to incorporate from an automation standpoint can go in from the back of the machine, operator still has full access to the front.

Wade Anderson:

So we're doing a lot more work in that area. You're going to see some new things coming out with VTLs, with some very unique features to make them automation friendly as well. So basically all the new designs as we move forward, start first with strength, thermal stability, and then automation. So those are kind of the three steps we'll make sure we look for.

John Tuohy:

And then what about a fourth step like data?

Wade Anderson:

Data, we actually just recorded a podcast based around that. So the OSP P-Series control has access to about 9,000 data points. So it's incredible, the amount of data you can extract from the machine. The important part though, is not... don't get enamored by how much data you can pull. It's how do you find what's meaningful to your process?

John Tuohy:

Correct.

Wade Anderson:

And that's where a lot of focus and attention is placed. We partner with companies like Praemo, who is an AI company that goes in and looks at the data. It looks at the raw data and then starts identifying anomalies to say, "Wait a minute. At three o'clock in the afternoon every day, you got a weird lull in your production. Something happens. And you can start unraveling that to find out, "Oh, guess what? We keep running out of way lube oil at 2:45.

Wade Anderson:

I'm just kind of making up a scenario, but you can identify those anomalies in your production process to be able to get ahead of it. And again, that's important from an automation standpoint, right?

John Tuohy:

For sure.

Wade Anderson:

We want to set these things up so they can run lights out unattended. Well, you can't do that if you've got something in your process that creates a bottleneck.

Dave Baldetti:

Yeah. As my earlier example of the moth, we figured that out, but it was through the old fashioned way. We had people there and we kind of monitor it, and one of the things we've incorporated now is the area scanner logs and records what happened. So we can go back and look in time what happens.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Dave Baldetti:

So we can see if somebody wanders through there, just seeing what's going on and causes a stop, or a cat or whatever it is that might stop something. We will now be able to see. And so that's the same, it's just data, ways to research what happened and hopefully create a fix.

John Tuohy:

Yeah, and from a FANUC perspective, depending on what your IOT initiatives are for your plant and your factory floor, we have a product called ZDT, which is an acronym for Zero Down Time. And originally, this software was developed in conjunction with General Motors to eliminate downtime. They might have in a specific plant, a couple of 100 robots deployed and if one goes down, the whole plant shuts down.

John Tuohy:

So General Motors drove us to develop a kinematic for us to start to research how the robot is performing an operation. So when we first came up with this product, it's about eight years old now, when we first came up with this product, we were able to detect failures two and three days in advance, which was revolutionary at the time. We've developed the kinematic to such a refined point that I can predict failures of a joint six months in advance.

Wade Anderson:

Wow.

John Tuohy:

By detecting those statistical anomalies that we're looking at on a daily basis. And what this allows the customer to do, and in conversations we've had, ZDT in my opinion, needs to be rebranded as an OEE monitor because I can extrapolate information from the cell is, how is the robot performing? What is the robot doing? Has there been a change? Many of the things we find, and a lot of times second shift comes in and says, "I don't like this point. I'm going to touch it up.” First shift comes back in, and the whole thing's all messed up.

John Tuohy:

ZDT tracks all those changes. So you can go back to the previous version of that software, the program, excuse me, to run that program, to run those parts, and then have your conversation with the second shift guy, why did he do that? But the point being is everything is logged. We use data to really drive our manufacturing decisions, even with the robot. And then plus, one of the objections we get, not objections, but one of the comments we get all the time about ZDT is, "Why do I need it? Your robots don't fail."

John Tuohy:

Well, it's not so much about failure as it is about understanding that OEE information as to how the robot is performing in your process, and then improving that if necessary.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent. Well guys, I think we're running into our time stop here. So I really appreciate the time you guys spent and the insights you brought to the table, just everything from automation to the manufacturing process as a whole. So thank you for your time today.

John Tuohy:

Oh, thank you Wade. It's been a pleasure.

Dave Baldetti:

Yes, thanks for having us. We really appreciate the products you guys sell and you guys sell really help us put together good solutions, I think.

John Tuohy:

And without you, they wouldn't be put together well.

Dave Baldetti:

Thank you.

Wade Anderson:

Partnerships. All right. And everybody listening, thank you for your time today. If you've got thoughts, ideas, questions, ideas for future podcasts, please hit us up on the Okuma website. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. Until then, we'll see you next time. Thanks guys.