In-Line Quality Inspection Capabilities with Flexxbotics Solution 

In last week’s blog, I talked about our latest release of the Flexxbotics solution for robot-driven manufacturing and the new multi-factory power.

Some of the other functionality that I’m excited about is the expansion of our in-line inspection capabilities, which use automated inspection results to drive real-time updates to off-sets in CNC machining programs which can significantly reduce rework and scrap.

What does it mean for you? This article in Design News summarizes it well:

“With in-line inspection, Flexxbotics orchestrates the fleets of robots in the smart factory to achieve continuous unattended operations enabling higher yields, greater throughput and increased profit per part.”

Flexxbotics takes automated inspection results for each part, we then run statistical process control (SPC) in real-time, and instruct the robots to sort any nonconformances and perform rework. In addition, you have the option to make autonomous updates to the CNC machine’s programs if you choose which can really cut your defect rate. We have implementations where we’ve reduced nonconformances by over 50%.

Closed-loop autonomy in the workcell is the critical capability that enables autonomous process control, which we believe is the foundation for true autonomous ‘lights-out’ manufacturing.

All types of inspection equipment can be included in-line – such as probes, vision systems, lasers, and Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs) – with the robots using the inspection results to make real-time modifications to the parameters/variables/macros in the PLC programs to adjust for processing changes, tool wear, and other factors.

This enables robotic production autonomy on even the most complex geometry parts with the highest level of precision. 

In the last few weeks, we have already announced robot compatibility for in-line inspection with Hexagon, Cognex, Renishaw, SICK equipment, and have enabled many others that we will be announcing soon.

Stay tuned for more news as the team rapidly expands our range of compatibility which is already 1000+ makes & models of inspection equipment, CNCs and other machinery.

To learn more about Flexxbotics Solution visit our Solutions Overview page.