Olis Robotics, a supplier of remote error recovery technology for industrial robots is now working with Kawasaki Robotics, enabling users of Kawasaki robots to reduce troubleshooting and downtime costs by up to 90%, restart production faster and gain access to expert support.
An on-premises device is provided by Olis to establish a secure internet connection and avoid the risks and complexities associated with cloud-based systems.
Alex Boffi of Kawasaki Robotics explained that the capabilities provided by Olis Robotics provides an “added layer of trend management, remote monitoring and remote error recovery which is not natively available on any major robot platform.”
At Modex 2024, Kawasaki and Olis highlighted their partnership in an exhibit designed by system integrator CRG Automation. The exhibit featured a robotic corner board system integrated with a mixed palletizing and depalletizing cell using a Kawasaki RS007L robot. The corner board system automates the placing of corner boards on pallets being wrapped to ensuring load stability.
The system, which handles multiple SKUs of unstructured products, uses the Olis Robotics remote error recovery software to alert users when the robot unexpectedly stops or when picking or placing a part fails. After a system failure, the Olis technology runs a tool inspection routine and performs remote error recovery, allowing the robot to resume its cycle and get back to work.
Fredrik Ryden, CEO of Olis Robotics, demonstrated the company’s technology showing how the robot work cell information feed can be accessed worldwide over 5G, allowing users to “zoom in and get a better picture of the issue. Users can also see the error log which, in this case, says the corner board was not found. The person who's responsible for this system would be immediately notified no matter where they are so they can go in and review the alert, get the synchronized log files and video and actually see the robot trying this via an instant replay of what happened to cause the error.”
He added that this visualization capability is “super important for robot experts because sometimes it's unclear why the robot stopped. Then the expert can do a proper root cause analysis to note that they've reviewed the footage and the system just needs to be restarted by selecting the main program to get it back up again and press play.”
From a system integrator point of view, Dillon Sego of CRG Automation said the Olis Robotics technology “allows us to not have to have someone on site 24/7 for the debug. As we're getting started and finding any nuisance issues that we have to get rid of and program out for the commissioning phase, we can do that all remotely now. We can control the robot, we can reset it, we can look at fault conditions and be able to offer a full-service package to the end user without having to have someone on site.”
The video below shows the demonstration at Modex.
