Design Energy
At Sutton Tools’ Kaiapoi twist-drill factory, three lots of industrial robots are used. Most of the operations carried out in the factory are too variable to be easily automated, but the laser etching and packaging of drills is undertaken by two pairs of robot arms. These dull and repetitive tasks are exactly the sort of jobs that are worthwhile to leave to machines. Most robots in New Zealand are used to ‘pack and stack’, especially when the items being moved are heavy. Sutton Tools’ robots were provided by Christchurch robotics company Design Energy. Managing director Mike Shatford says that as the cost of robots has reduced so dramatically over the past decade and their capabilities have increased, they have become much more attractive to small- and medium-sized businesses. This is highly relevant in New Zealand because 95 per cent of local companies fall into this category. Mike spends most of his time visiting businesses and promoting robots as a possible answer to manufacturing problems. He says, “Robots are the solution.” The return time for an investment in robots can be as little as six months.
Design Energy is the New Zealand distributor for two manufacturers of robots: one is the giant Japanese company Nachi; the other is Universal Robots (UR) from Denmark. UR has been credited with the creation of a new class of robots called ‘cobots’, of which nearly 30,000 have been made. These are designed to interact safely with humans and to be able to be programmed amazingly easily, almost intuitively. Workers can be taught to programme the UR cobots in less than two hours. They cost from NZ$30K to NZ$50K, half the price of 10 years ago, and are very easily repurposed, being able to be switched between different tasks with minimal delays in production.
Design Energy works with customers like Sutton Tools to engineer processes involving robots. At present it is working on a large robot to stack heavy pieces of metal on pallets. The 11 engineers employed by the company work on the design of the jaws to hold the metal ingots and the software to control the robotic arm’s movements.