OMRON Industrial Automation manufactures technologically advanced industrial automation products to provide customised expert solutions for any industry. The product portfolio includes factory automation, sensors and safety, mechatronics and drives, industrial components and vision systems.
Diversifying consumer needs, skills shortages, and other challenges to the manufacturing industry are intensifying by the day across the world. Omron tackles these challenges through three innovations which make up the Omron value generation concept ‘i-Automation!’.
These are:
- integrated (control evolution)
- intelligent (developing intelligence through ICT)
- interactive (human-machine collaboration).
Omron ‘i-Automation!’ solutions enable anyone to easily replicate master craftsmanship. It also creates production lines where machines can continue to learn and develop on their own. Machines understand and assist humans. This is a kind of Manufacturing Innovation that only Omron can deliver, with over 200,000 products and on-site support capabilities.
Omron finely coordinates its extensive collection of more than 200,000 products with unique control software to provide over 170 kinds of control applications that enable easy replication of advanced craftsmanship, such as ultra-high speed machine control and ultra-high precision processing. Omron solutions visualise the production site through nearly 100,000 IoT control devices and make full use of production site data with unique AI technology.
The company’s goal is to create downtime-free production lines and defect-free production facilities through measures such as remote predictive maintenance and near-human sensory inspections. Omron solutions enable coordination between machines and humans by coupling human labour with IoT, collaborative robots, and other technology. The company’s goal is to realize an ultra-flexible means of production where machines understand and assist humans.
Industrial robots are generally designed for one of three tasks: high-speed movements, high-precision placement, or high-payload movements. The risks to workers during operation are readily apparent — if a large robot is moving heavy payloads at high speeds, everyone nearby will understand the risks to their health and safety. Consequently, few individuals will question the need to isolate industrial robots from human contact during operation using hard guarding, safety interlocks, and safety sensing devices.
Cobot collaboration
Collaborative robots (cobots), on the other hand, are not high-speed, high-payload, or exceptionally high-precision devices. Instead, they are designed to function in a collaborative space with workers, boosting production and reducing employee fatigue by automating repetitive tasks. They have been introduced as being safer than industrial robots thanks to their design profile and built-in safety features, but this conception is contrary to established safety standards.
As a hybrid technology in the industrial automation space, cobots are a bridge between isolated industrial robots and human assembly line operations. As such, they collaborate in the industrial workspace. That said, more effort is needed to demystify cobots. The early expectations and assumptions surrounding this technology have led to disappointment in their performance for some.
Early adopters have found what they perceived to be deficiencies, such as built-in safety features that are neither comprehensive nor failproof, a slower overall motion relative to conventional robots (making cobots seem safer), and smaller payloads. Conversely, for some users, there were unexpected upsides due to their features and performance. These include cobots being easy to teach compared to standard robots (consider the visual tag on the TM Series), their highly intuitive software, and the fact that robot integrators are not required.
Because of the mismatch between perception and reality behind the features and usability of cobots, a comprehensive safety solution cannot be ignored. This drives the need for a standards-based risk assessment to consider application-specific risks posed by the cobot and the creation of an external safety package to supplement its built-in safety features.
New cobot terminology
The area in which the robot operates, and its associated tooling or additional equipment, is known as the collaborative workspace. As defined by ISO 10218/ANSI RIA 15.06, this is the space within the safeguarded area where the robot and human operator can perform tasks simultaneously during production. Similarly, TS 15066 defines it as the area within the operating space where the robot system can perform tasks concurrently with a human operator during production.
Omron will be exhibiting at stand B12.
