When a small business builds a robot application

CM Hammar is a small business in Gothenburg with approx. 50 employees. They manufacture products for safety at sea under the motto "better solutions for safety at sea". One of the segments is the mechanism that activates inflatable life jackets, a so-called Inflator. A valve opens when the Inflator ends up in water and a pressure difference is reached. This product is manufactured by CM Hammar itself in their factory in Gothenburg. The valve body is glued to the Inflator with Cyanoacrylate, a quick glue that is not healthy for people to breathe in or touch.

To improve the working environment for the fitters, CM Hammar decided to buy a robot and create a robot application that can glue, instead of a human. They wanted to create a simple application and therefore chose to build a collaborative robot application. Such an application does not need a cage and is thus more flexible and easier to build. In addition, the surface is available for the person who is to fill the warehouse and take the pallets that the robot has filled. The company decided on a Sawyer robot, because it is quite powerful. It has the ability to have different fingers at the same time, it has a large range, and it has power sensors. “It would not have worked with another robot. At least not with these pallets that the robot has to fill”. The robot's sensors enable it to find the holes where the products should sit with the help of force monitoring. Through force monitoring, the robot also notices if something goes wrong, e.g. if it were to get stuck. Instead of getting stuck and pulling down the entire palette, the robot notices that it is another force that acts, and stops instead. However, one should carefully examine which robot one chooses, for this robot is not suitable for all uses. Due to the sensors in all joints, the robot sways and seeks the position instead of hitting directly, which not only has advantages but also disadvantages such as extending the cycling time.

During the creation of the facility, the employees experienced various challenges, which is also due to the fact that the company is a small business. For a small business, it is impossible to disrupt rolling production and it is difficult to set aside people to create and test the new plant. CM Hammar is happy that they have smart employees who create creative solutions, such as to add a pigment to the glue so that it has a blue color and becomes visible. They have also 3D-printed various parts of the application such as some of the robot's fingers.

Despite all the challenges, CM Hammar managed to build a robot application that can now glue and press the valve on the rest of the product and put all the finished products in pallets. Through this application, the company can save about 3-4 hours of work per day and, above all, improve the work environment because no one needs to work with the toxic glue anymore.

Right now, the employees are focusing on the facility being stable and able to run five days a week. They work to fix bugs that occur when making larger batches. A future project will also be to reduce the number of discarded parts by optimizing the gluing process.