Material handling

Rapid growth in e-commerce and fulfillment demands collaborative innovation. From bin picking to packaging and everything in between, cobots improve and streamline workflows by maintaining traceability and quality.

Fulfill manufacturing demands with cobot automation

Manufacturing and distribution demands are constantly growing. As materials and products move through warehouses, factory floors, and transportation, cobots provide an efficient solution in ensuring they are well-protected from damage.

Collaborative robots can handle repetitive material handling tasks across industries, which typically include loading and unloading parts, moving pieces from point A to B, stacking and destacking boxes, palletizing and depalletizing, and sorting. With precise and secure end-of-arm tools that can be deployed flexibly, cobots can securely grip items and automate repetitive movements through desired transport routes. This frees up the time and energy of human workers, who can then spend their time in more skilled roles.

Material handling cobots in action

See how cobots have been deployed in material handling to help businesses streamline workflows and increase productivity - without compromising quality.

Free up skilled labor

Labman Automation is a UK technology company specializing in designing and manufacturing lab robotics. Collaborative robot arm UR3e was integrated into a powder dispensing platform to create an automated dosing platform, freeing up to 6 hours of manual experiment time from high-cost lab technicians. The cobot arm had changing gripper finger tips to pick and place vials, dosing heads, adapters, and more.

Increase production

IPTec, a South Korean manufacturer of ignition transformers, deployed two UR3 cobots in picking up and moving ignition transformers for soldering, inspection, and marking. Production was increased by 123%, while costs were reduced by approximately 8%. Defect rate was also limited to about 0%, providing consistent quality.

Achieve higher throughput

Chicago-area Napco Brands is a private-label business that focuses on roasting and packing coffee beans. The business employed two palletizing robots by UR to automate the packaging line, picking up boxes as they arrived on a conveyor. A 15% increase in throughput was observed, and manual labor was freed up for more skilled tasks.

Streamline your operations

Streamline your material handling, packaging and palletizing, bin picking, labeling and kitting operations with collaborative robots. Relieve workers from repetitive work and heavy lifting by automating material handling tasks with lightweight collaborative robot arms. Automation helps you combat the rising costs of new product packaging and shortened product life cycles, and makes it easy to keep up with seasonal peaks despite labor shortages.

Innovative grippers

Cobots with innovative grippers, computer vision and machine-learning systems can pick up a wide range of objects even in unstructured environments such as a bins or totes. Easily integrated SKU scanning and the ability to pick up pouches or products of nearly any size or shape make e-commerce, fulfillment, warehousing, logistics and supply chain operations simpler, faster, and more efficient.

Repetitive tasks

The UR robot’s intuitive, easy-to-program interface makes the arm perfect for small-volume applications as well as highly repetitive tasks. You can reprogram and redeploy the robot as needed across your operations. If your work flow changes, the material handling robotic arm can be deployed quickly and easily in new constellations due to its small size and lightweight design.

Complete your cobot

Our collaborative, industrial robots require add-ons to reach their full potential. This worlds of additional products in an entire ecosystem on its own. We at Universal Robots take the high pride in our ecosystem, which is called UR+.

Application kits

Application kits are useful for those who can install their own solution but are looking for a compatible set of end-effectors, software and other accessories

Components

Components are single products that can be combined with our UR robot to create an entire solution. This includes items such end-effectors, 7th axis, software or teach pendants.

Solutions

Solutions are flexible and easy to integrate and typically allow for variation in the choice of grippers and all the necessary accessories. These pre-assembled packages are ideal if you are looking for a plug-and-play solution with low risk, a manageable budget and on-site setup.

Tried. Tested. Trusted.

Universal Robots has deployed over 90,000 cobots into every manufacturing industry. Companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 giants to local contract machine shops, are leveraging our 6th generation cobots to increase productivity and quality and improve job satisfaction for their manufacturing teams.

Flexible

UR cobots meet the demands for flexibility head-on with industry-leading ease-of-use, intuitive programming, and a powerful back-end for OEMs and developers to add value and meet specific needs. UR cobot-based systems generate ROI that is usually measured in months, not years.

Worker-safe, worker-friendly

Universal Robots has developed the most complete set of safety tools and functions in the industry. Our safety protocols can be configured to meet the varied safety requirements of your plant or facilities and your application risk assessment, letting your manufacturing team work safely side-by-side with UR cobots.

Get in touch with Universal Robots

Thousands of businesses rely on Collaborative Robots to...

- Increase productivity
- Adapt to changing product demand
- Improve employee well-being and retention
- Staff through labor shortages