Design for Industry Robotics
Robots double the production of medical devices
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Medical device manufacturer Tegra Medical faced profit erosion as costs
went up and customers demanded price cuts. Deploying three collaborative robot arms from Universal Robots to tend the machines manufacturing medical instruments doubled throughput, freed up 11 full time positions and enabled the
Tegra employees can work next to the UR robots without fencing due to the robot’s built-in safety system that causes the robot to stop operating if it could collide with a person.
manufacturer to keep up with customer demand while keeping costs down.
The novel robot cell is working at Tegra Medical’s main production facility In
Franklin, Massachusetts, operating next to employees and producing components for a Meniscal repair device. The robot arm performing the machine tending is a UR10 from Universal Robots. With a reach of 51 in., it picks up blanks from three different hoppers, feeds two of them into two grinders while the third product goes into a lathe where an internal cutting tool creates a bevel edge on the end of a Meniscal repair device. Before Tegra built the UR10 robotic cell, they started out with two smaller cells each tended by a UR5 robot arm, UR10’s “little brother,” featuring the same 4 mils repeatability but with a reach of 33.5 in. The UR5 picks up the blank from the feeder and then moves it between the lathe, the grinder and the conveyor in a cycle that now takes only 10 seconds compared with the 22 seconds it took with manual labor.
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March 2018 www.designworldonline.com
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