About This Course

Manufacturing SME’s struggling with qualified labor cost or repetitive operation quality. Informed from whatever source about the values of robotics / cobotics / Industry 4.0 but without any clear guidance on how to face the potential opportunities connected with their use.

Collaborative robots are being hyped as a pinnacle technology in the Industry 4.0 trend. Although it is very true, their implementation needs to be carefully planned and verified to yield the anticipated results. Perceived as simpler and easier to adopt than industrial robots, cobots value is often misunderstood and what suffers is the overall efficiency of the implemented solution.

The course will deep dive into the parameters of collaborative robots that make them useful in different industrial scenarios. Typical successful application scenarios for cobots will be presented along with the most common mistakes that lead towards the decreased investment yield.

Main subunits include:

• Typical cobot failure scenarios.
  Reasons of human collisions, programming errors, interferences and environmental factors for cobot usage that cause failures. How to avoid these and identify risks at the early stages of investment planning.

• Successful cobot application showcase. The real scenarios where the cobots do typically yield expected results provided with cost and calculations.
  Handling, painting, inspection, testing, packaging, palletizing, welding, tending. Successful applications explained and evaluated with key success factors being denoted.

• Implementation timing assessment. How to plan the project and what to expect.
  Time boundaries evaluation. What are typical lead times for cobot applications? What should we buy and what should we do ourselves? What competences do we need?

• The right ways for ROI calculation.
  How to calculate the ROI and check whether the ROI provided by the vendor is accurate and would work long-term (more than 2 years).

• Vendor lock-in, maintenance and other market factors.
  Avoiding lock-ins and too much dependency. Negotiating with market providers to maximize ROI.