Flexible Manufacturing Roadshow comes to the UK
Omron has taken its European Flexible Manufacturing Roadshow on the road to Bradford, featuring exclusive demonstrations of cutting-edge, human-machine collaborative solutions not usually seen outside of a factory setting due to their size and scale.
Held at Strategic Partner Reeco Automation’s new dedicated Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Centre in Rowan Park, Bradford, over 75 invited guests from manufacturers across the food and beverage, automotive and pharmaceutical sectors received real-life inspiration for reimagining and reconfiguring their manufacturing lines.
The demonstration area, comprising over 200m2 showcased a range of practical solutions for the factories of the future, enabling flexible and intelligent production improvements. The roadshow allowed visitors such as Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Carlsberg and Morrisons, to witness first-hand experience of large-scale human-machine industrial automation solutions to address some of the key challenges affecting manufacturers, such as palletising, transportation and traceability.
Facilitating more agile and flexible manufacturing with less reliance on manual labour, reduced energy consumption and increased OEE, Omron’s solutions are also future-proofed for the digital era. Featured at the roadshow was Omron’s strongest fully autonomous mobile robot (the HD-1500) for heavy loads of up to 1,500 kg, a variety of flexible palletising and autonomous material transportation solutions and the RB1200 cobot palletiser working in harmony and sustainably with the operators. Other complete solutions to solve the current issues and pains of manufacturers included box to pallet transportation, box to mobile robot top conveyor and conveyor to pallet with Omron TM cobot.
Each system featured a combination of natural navigation and selectable autonomy navigation, IoT dashboard, built-in serialisation offering full traceability along the entire manufacturing process, and of course, the company’s intelligent Sysmac control platform
Omron’s UK marketing manager Stuart Coulton comments: “We are delighted to bring some of our most dynamic, collaborative human-machine automation solutions out of the factory and on tour for the first time ever in the UK, so that our key customers can look at and touch the flexible manufacturing systems of the future. We hope that the roadshow will inspire today’s manufacturers to reimagine what is possible on their production lines, enabling their facilities to remain agile for years to come.”
Mike Wilson, chief automation officer at the Manufacturing Technology Centre attended the event and commented: “This has been an excellent event. Attendees have learned a lot about automation products and the use of mobile robot technology and how they could benefit the UK manufacturing industry. The demonstrations show the art of the possible and that automation will be key to ensuring a competitive manufacturing sector for the future.”
The Flexible Manufacturing Roadshow will continue its journey around Europe, with the next stop being Germany, then Poland before finishing in the Benelux region.
Visit the Omron website for more information
