Advantech is a global leader in IoT, intelligent systems, and embedded platforms with a vision to enable an intelligent planet. To embrace the trends of IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence, Advantech promotes IoT hardware and software solutions. We work with business partners to co-create business ecosystems that accelerate the goal of industrial intelligence.
The Challenge
As factory automation advances and the labor market changes, there are new pressures put on factory and manufacturing organisations to increase flexibility, reduce risks, and improve margins. This gained world-wide attention with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The world watched as manufacturing transformed to meet changing demands. And automation professionals are looking for better ways to adapt their factories to address these challenges in similar situations in the future.
- Orders are no longer stable, and your production plan is not certain. How can you improve margins when market changes can quickly disrupt your planning?
- Flexibility is key. You need to be able to switch production quickly, for example changing a beer plant into a sanitiser production plant within a week. Or starting to produce ventilators using car parts. How can you achieve this flexibility?
- A new level of health and safety requirements will need to be implemented. How can you reduce the health risks?
Almost 40% of the manual labor in a factory is spent moving components that arrive at the factory in bins and boxes to feed the machines for the next production step. Some manufacturers have automated this with conventional feeders. Unfortunately, these are expensive, loud, cannot be retrofitted, and still require a lot of attention from employees. Other manufacturers have introduced pick and place robots, but operators still have to spend a lot of time staging parts in a structured way in front of a robot. However, there is a third group of automation professionals taking a different approach to automating machine tending
The Solution
These professionals already use robots and they want to have more flexibility – to produce smaller quantities of a wider range of products. In addition to this, they want to be able to teach a robot to deal with new components on the factory floor with their own workforce – without the need for technical experts.
This is the classic example of a Pickit customer.
Pickit 3D was founded in 2016 to solve the challenges created by machine tending. Machine tending involves feeding parts to a production machine. Orientation and position mean everything. The performance of the application is measured not only by cycle time, but also by the position and the orientation accuracy when the part is placed by the robot.
This company saw the potential to simplify process automation with a single product – 3D vision system for pick and place robots. Pickit guides robots to pick parts directly out of the bin, box, pallet or conveyor and place them with the required orientation into a machine. Changeover happens with a push of a button: instead of taking up space in your factory to stock different jigs, fixtures and feeders, you simply store the vision algorithms on your PC.
3D vision algorithms require complex calculations and iterations to detect parts in a scattered bin. All Pickit software comes pre-installed on a powerful industrial processor from Advantech.
Pickit is leading developments in the market of 3D vision guided robotics, with software updates released every three months. Pickit first reached out to Advantech because this system requires a higher core CPU with enough threads to deal with the information brought by the Pickit 3D camera. As the company continues to evolve the solution toward artificial intelligence, greater power is required. The Advantech processor is a trusted partner for Pickit’s solution.
The Benefits
The big advantage of 3D vision is its flexibility:
- It solves applications with overlapping parts which vary in shape and size
- You can teach the system to detect and handle a whole variety of objects
- You can achieve fast changeovers: when you’re done with a part, just remove the empty bin and place a new bin with the next product.
As many Pickit customers have stated, they use 3D cameras to reduce the need for human labor while increasing output.
Why Advantech
Pickit went with an Advantech processor to support their key customer benefits:
- The Advantech processor is preinstalled and ready-to-use, which saves installation and setup time
- Advantech’s standard products are available globally, which cuts costs using an off-the-shelf product
- Advantech’s compact design helps get rid of bulky and space-taking fixtures
- Pickit customers can worry less with 24/7 reliability due to the Advantech industrial design and global support
“We used to finish 400 units a day with six people in a high-pressure environment; after automating with Pickit, we now easily finish 1,000 units with only three people that are experiencing less pressure and are generally happier.” – Managing Director Roelof Talen of Talen Tools
About Advantech
Founded in 1983, Advantech is the leading manufacturer of industrial computing, display and communications products. Advantech offers its build, configuration and design services worldwide, through a global sales, logistics and support organisation that works with its customers and their end-users wherever our equipment ends up. We cooperate closely with our distribution partners, software, hardware and
communication partners, system integrators and consultants to provide complete solutions to complex computing and communications challenges. Our mission is to enable an intelligent planet by developing the automation and embedded computing products on which it will run. With Advantech products, the application and innovation potential is unlimited.
www.advantech.eu
