Possible Robotic Applications for the Metal Industry

The metal industry is one of the biggest revenue-generating industries in today’s economy. It impacts various end-user applications and caters to a vast range of sectors: agriculture, automotive, medical, aerospace, construction, electronics, and many more. As it is such a huge industry, it needs automation to meet the standards and production rate of the demanded supply.

Robots accomplish various jobs in the metal industry. These tasks can vary from part handling to welding, assembly, painting, and cutting.

Let’s delve into some of the automation possibilities that robots can handle in the metal industry:

Part Handling:

This is one of the most common, yet one of the most necessary usages of robots in the metal industry. Part handling is basically picking either raw material or a finished product from one spot and placing it in another designated spot. It can also involve the robot operating with another machine like a forming press, a CNC, etc. Tasks included are, but are not limited to

Loading
Unloading
Palletizing

Selection of parts
Reorienting
Sorting

Operating with classic metal industry machine (Press, Laser cutting, Plasma cutting, etc)

It allows the handling of large, heavy, and dangerous objects safely on a large scale and at a fast pace. Moreover, it provides high repeatability and efficiency with minimal changeover time between products.

Robotic Deburring:

Deburring is a necessary and important step in the metal industry as this makes the product more client-ready. This means high repeatability is needed for products to be consistent. When done by humans, errors increase and repeatability decreases. Automation helps manufacturers yield higher profits in a medium to long-term perspective. Robotic deburring also improves the quality of the produced part thanks to the fact that the robot’s settings and toolings can be customized according to each of the part’s requirements and be compliant with some part variations. This helps minimize defects.

Have a look at our DIY-Robotics Deburring Cell Bundle, developed in partnership with ATI Automation and RoboDK.

Robotic Painting:

Metal painting has always been a health hazard for humans as it involves toxic components. Thankfully, robotizing this task helps reduce risks for workers. Also, robots have more consistency and precision than humans when applying paint.

In the automotive industry, some robots are used for paint jobs. GM motors and Volkswagen are good examples of this. Robots can do the initial primer, electrostatic, and final coat of paint in a short amount of time. They offer high flexibility, high quality, more control over the process, and all the while, decrease paint and material costs.

Robotic Welding

Welding is an operation where precision and consistency are both very much required. Due to this demand for precision, robotic welding has been a part of the metal industry for a long time.

Robotic welding guarantees high quality and high quantity welding with accuracy and repeatability. There are different types of robotic welding: laser, plasma, arc, TIG, MIG, and others. This technology saves industries both time and money. On top of that, it also helps reduce waste. All this makes it an expensive, but necessary investment. This is especially true for industries with small to medium-scale productions which have suffered a shortage of workers in recent years.

Some alternative solutions like the Robotic Welding Assistant have a better ROI for smaller productions that would like to automate more. It’s a collaborative solution that saves industries from hidden costs and it is ready to install and start-up.

Robotic Cutting:

Robotic cutting allows for high precision and higher quality cuts, irrespective of the complexity of the cutting blueprints. Some of the technologies used for robotic cutting are laser, plasma, waterjet, and others. Robotic cutting helps workers avoid working with high temperatures cutting and they even accelerate the process.

Robotic cutting is currently used mostly in the automotive, electronics, and sheet metal industries.

Robots are contributing more and more to the industrial revolution by doing mundane and repetitive work. In this blog, we only discussed a few Robotic Applications. There are many other robotic possibilities for the metal industry such as assembly, machine-tending, and quality checks. That last one is especially pertinent in a manufacturing industry of the automotive sector. With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), robot’s capabilities are increasing. The horizon is still expanding and there is still much more to go until we can maximize the usage of robots.