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Robotics and Factory Automation

Arms, cobots and mobile robots doing the work that used to need a crew.

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We wrote a full explainer for this category: Robotic Palletizing and Handling Cells. What the machine does, how it works, the numbers that matter and who buys one.

14 films

  • Video thumbnail: How many robots it takes to run a grocery store 5:08
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    How many robots it takes to run a grocery store

    Thousands of wheeled robots swarm across a grid the size of a football field, closing on each other at speed and missing by centimetres because a central brain schedules every move in advance. A grocery order that a person would walk two miles to pick is assembled in minutes. It is the clearest explanation on the internet of what goods-to-person automation actually looks like at full scale.

    Tom Scott 2021

  • Video thumbnail: A Mercedes body shop where robots build the car 13:52
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    A Mercedes body shop where robots build the car

    Fourteen minutes inside a Mercedes body shop where sheet metal is welded, glued and handed between robots without a person in frame. Cells pass car bodies to each other like a relay team. KUKA published this as a capability film and it remains one of the most complete looks at a modern automotive body shop anywhere online.

    KUKA Group 2010

  • Video thumbnail: Inside an AI-run robotic warehouse 10:26
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    Inside an AI-run robotic warehouse

    A fleet of autonomous mobile robots carries totes to picking stations while robotic arms take the individual items out. Nothing in the building waits for a person to walk anywhere. Brightpick built this to show order fulfilment with no human in the movement loop at all, and the choreography is genuinely unsettling to watch.

    Brightpick 2024

  • Video thumbnail: Case-handling robots running a whole distribution center 4:18
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    Case-handling robots running a whole distribution center

    Symbotic replaces the pallet rack and the forklift with autonomous bots that run the full height and depth of the structure at speed. Cases are broken down, stored individually and rebuilt into store-ready pallets in the exact order a shelf stocker wants them. Watching a pallet get assembled to a floor plan is a strange kind of satisfying.

    Symbotic 2023

  • Video thumbnail: A robot sewing a car seat cover 4:05
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    A robot sewing a car seat cover

    A robot arm feeding fabric through a sewing head sounds impossible, because cloth does not hold its shape. KUKA solved it by making the robot the feeder and the needle the fixed point, and the seat cover comes out straight. Anyone who has tried to automate soft goods will understand exactly how hard this is.

    KUKA Group 2010

  • Video thumbnail: Inside a robotic arc welding cell 4:00
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    Inside a robotic arc welding cell

    A turnkey arc welding cell where a positioner rotates the part while the robot lays a bead, then flips to the second station so the operator loads while the robot keeps welding. Zero idle arc time is the whole point. Yaskawa walks through the layout clearly enough that a shop owner can see their own parts in it.

    Yaskawa Motoman Robotics 2023

  • Video thumbnail: A robot tending a CNC machine on its own 3:44
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    A robot tending a CNC machine on its own

    A collaborative robot loads and unloads a CNC machine all night with no fence, no light curtain and no operator standing by. Universal Robots put real numbers on it: lower cost per part and materially higher throughput. It is the most credible small-shop automation case study on YouTube.

    Universal Robots 2019

  • Video thumbnail: A warehouse stacked into a solid cube of bins 3:27
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    A warehouse stacked into a solid cube of bins

    AutoStore deletes the aisles. Bins are stacked directly on top of each other in a solid aluminum cube and robots drive across the roof, digging down for whatever is needed. The result is roughly four times the storage in the same building, which is why the system spread from Norway to warehouses on every continent.

    AutoStore 2018

  • Video thumbnail: A robot palletizing cartons 3:18
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    A robot palletizing cartons

    An ABB palletizing robot builds layer patterns out of cartons at a rate that would take three people and cost one of them a back. The gripper picks whole rows at once. It is a clean, no-music look at the single most common robot application in the packaging world.

    ABB Robotics 2013

  • Video thumbnail: Autonomous mobile robots moving loads on a live floor 2:53
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    Autonomous mobile robots moving loads on a live floor

    Autonomous mobile robots move carts and pallets through a working plant, negotiating doorways, people and each other with no floor magnets and no wire guidance. They map the building and re-plan on the fly. It is the difference between an AGV that follows a line and an AMR that decides its own route.

    Milvus Robotics 2018

  • Video thumbnail: A vision robot picking and packing snack packs 2:27
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    A vision robot picking and packing snack packs

    Two ABB delta robots track salami slices tumbling down a moving belt and drop them into trays without ever stopping the line. Vision picks out each piece, the controller assigns it to a robot, and the arms move fast enough that the human eye loses them. It is the single best demonstration of why food plants stopped hand-packing.

    ABB Robotics 2010

  • Video thumbnail: Multi-line robotic palletizing and stretch wrapping 2:12
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    Multi-line robotic palletizing and stretch wrapping

    Multiple production lines feed one robotic palletizing island, which builds mixed pallets and hands them straight to a stretch wrapper. The robot never stops and the lines never back up. This is what the end of a packaging hall looks like when it is designed properly rather than added on later.

    FANUC America Corporation 2019

  • Video thumbnail: Autonomous mobile robots inside a car plant 1:45
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    Autonomous mobile robots inside a car plant

    Ford put ABB autonomous mobile robots into a live automotive plant to shuttle parts between stations. Short, factual and shot on the floor rather than in a studio. The value here is seeing AMRs mixed with human traffic in a real building instead of a demo cell.

    ABB Robotics 2023

  • Video thumbnail: A 3D-vision robot depalletizing mixed cases 0:57
    Robotics and Factory Automation

    A 3D-vision robot depalletizing mixed cases

    A 3D camera looks at a pallet of randomly stacked boxes, works out where every box edge is, and an ABB arm strips the layers off one at a time. No teaching, no fixed pattern, no two pallets alike. Machine vision solving an unstructured problem in real time is the whole show here.

    Photoneo, now part of Zebra Technologies 2020

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