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Cobots solve a sticky situation

Emtek

In short

UR cobots have optimized glue dispensing at Emtek, a Los Angeles-based door hardware manufacturer. The company was looking for a more consistent way to handle glue dispensing in manufacturing door knobs. A UR5 from Universal Robots now dispenses the glue with speed and accuracy, working in perfect collaboration with the operator who places the knob on the stem after the glue is applied. The tandem effort has doubled production output per man-hour on the high mix/low volume production line.

The business transformation

Emtek has been making a wide variety of door knobs for more than 30 years. Unlike many of the company’s competitors, Emtek is a highly specialized manufacturer with a typical production run of only 40-60 items with frequent change-overs. Not a production that typically lends itself well to automation with traditional industrial robots.

Emtek

Industry Furniture and Equipment

Country North America

Number of Employees 50-100

Cobot used UR5

Video — Emtek, USA

Embracing cobots

Vice President of Engineering at Emtek, Birk Sorensen, first heard of Universal Robots from its parent company, ASSA ABLOY, that already has UR cobots working in factories in New Zealand and Romania.

“They suggested that if we were interested in robots—and we were encouraged to get into robotics—that Universal Robots was a good collaborative robot. It had the ability to work very closely with an operator in the same vicinity,” says Sorensen. “It did not need to be fenced off and we could quickly change programs between production runs. This collaborative approach has doubled our daily throughput per man-hour.”

Simple installation

The engineering team was surprised at the ease of installation that took about a week for the cell to be fully operational. “It was incredibly simple. It did not require all the heavy-duty programming we have with our CNC machines,” says Sorensen, whose team had no prior experience with robotics.

One of the production challenges now solved with the UR cobot is controlling the volume of the epoxy and the consistency of the dispensing. A task that had proved challenging to do with manual labor.

Controlling the process

Another challenge was troubleshooting rejects. “By having the Universal Robot dispensing the proper amount of glue, it just standardizes the whole process,” says Edgar Medina, Director of Production Operations at Emtek. “Now we can go back to the robot and look at the programming, the dispensing, the whole process. It’s under a controlled environment and we can pinpoint the issue right away.”

Emtek’s UR5 typically dispenses glue about seven hours every day. “In many cases we use the same pallet; but we just change the program and instead of using knob “A,” we would then turn to knob “B,” and maybe two hours later we’ll shift again", explains Sorensen, adding that Emtek currently stores seven different programs on the robot. “The operator simply picks the correct program and the robot is up and running. It really is that simple.”

This collaborative approach has doubled our daily throughput per man-hour.

Birk Soerensen, Vice President of Engineering, Emtek

About Emtek

Emtek is part of ASSA ABLOY, the leading door opening solutions company in the world. Founded in 1981, Emtek has decades of experience creating door hardware. Each order is custom assembled at the company’s Southern California facility. There is no predetermined combination of knobs, levers, rosettes and finishes; Emtek lets customers mix and match according to their own taste.
https://www.emtek.com

Each EMTEK order is custom assembled at the company’s Southern California facility. There is no predetermined combination of knobs, levers, rosettes and finishes.