OnRobot
Delivering on its mission to break down automation barriers and bring the benefits of collaborative automation to businesses of all sizes, OnRobot has launched D:PLOY, its highly anticipated flagship platform, for worldwide availability. D:PLOY is the industry’s first automated platform for building, running, monitoring, and re-deploying collaborative applications. By automating the process of getting a robotic application up and running, D:PLOY allows complete applications to be deployed and redeployed directly on the manufacturing floor in a few simple steps, with zero programming – all within a few hours. At launch, the D:PLOY platform supports palletizing, CNC machine tending, packaging, and transferring (pick-and-place) applications, with future announcements planned for additional processes.
“The D:PLOY platform and its ability to truly democratize automation has been OnRobot’s goal from the beginning, and we have been laying the groundwork for years,” says Enrico Krog Iversen, OnRobot CEO. “Today, we offer the industry’s broadest range of tools and application solutions for every leading robot brand – all based on our “One System, Zero Complexity” philosophy. Now that the building blocks are in place, we can finally launch the first version of D:PLOY, which will be a market enabler across the industry.”
D:PLOY addresses one of the industry’s greatest challenges: the shortage of skilled robotics engineers and integrators who can help smaller, less-experienced manufacturers break through existing barriers to automation.
“D:PLOY simplifies the task of building and integrating a robotic cell with an innovative approach that doesn’t require any type of programming,” says Simon Potzkai, Robotics Sales Engineer at Alexander Bürkle, an OnRobot system integrator and a D:PLOY beta tester. “With the current shortage of engineers, that’s a huge advantage for integrators. By making it easier and faster for us to deploy automation, we can serve more customers and help them more quickly realize the advantages of automation. That’s a win-win for everyone.”
As an automated platform that works with many leading robot brands and can be applied to a wide range of common applications, D:PLOY can help speed up robotic adoption within the large untapped segment of small and mid-sized enterprises.
“D:PLOY will make automation accessible for companies who may be a bit reluctant, whether it is related to cost or in-house skills and competences,” says Alan Vallis, Training and Development Manager at LG Motion Ltd., an OnRobot distributor. “I think D:PLOY will demystify a lot of that.”
How D:PLOY works
D:PLOY automates many of the manual steps necessary today for building and running an application. D:PLOY automatically discovers most of the installed hardware, and generates the robot motion based on the obstacles and cell boundaries defined in the workspace. The program logic, signals exchange, event handling, and robot movement are automatically created for the entire application based on a few inputs such as workpiece attributes and pick position.
D:PLOY offers unrivaled reduction in robotic cell deployment time and complexity. For example, initial deployment of a palletizing application drops from 40 hours to 4 hours, for a 90% time savings. Just as critically, when production requirements change, D:PLOY gives the flexibility to quickly re-deploy the application for new products or workpieces. Real-time monitoring improves productivity and minimizes downtime.