People used to (actually, still do) respond to my answer about what I cover as automation, “Oh, robots.” And I’d say, “Yes, that, too.” The robot market was pretty stagnant for quite a time until the cobot flurry from Denmark. Then, quiet again for the most part. Something interesting does come my way at times. The current topic seems to be expansion of software control to make robotics easier to use and with expanded repertoire.
Flexxbotics announced the latest release of FlexxCORE, the patent-pending technology at the center of the Flexxbotics solution. The new release delivers more powerful capabilities for advanced robotic machine tending, robotic quality control, and robotic production lines by enabling robots—both industrial and collaborative—to run multiple machines with multiple operations for multiple part SKUs. These new FlexxCORE capabilities equip manufacturers to scale robotic production across the smart factory in a standardized way for greater plant capacity, quality, and EBITDA margins.
FlexxCORE now includes enhanced robot awareness, parallelized data pipelines, and greater data granularity which further extends the interoperable communication and coordination between robots, factory machines, inspection equipment, and other plant machinery.
- Enhanced Robot Awareness – Empowers robots in advanced tending scenarios to interpret each machines’ jobs, processing routines, operational status, and more
- Parallelized Data Pipelines – Leverages asynchronous, parallel pipelines for hyperperformant real time robot+multi-machine orchestration
- Greater Data Granularity – Expanded data model and event data capture for robotic operational context, pattern recognition, and machine learning
FlexxCORE is a low-code environment for composing and running Transformers – powerful translation driver connectors – which includes a secure, high performance run-time framework with data pipelines, protocols, class structures, method sets, and data models for development. Transformers enable bi-directional read/write between robots and all types of factory equipment for many-to-many interoperability.
FlexxCORE delivers compatibility with over 1000 different makes and models of robots, machines, other factory machinery and inspection equipment options, and enables 22x faster connector creation than conventional automation integration methods.
Now, global companies can roll out production robotics across the smart factory in a standardized way for advanced robotic machine tending to enable:
- Robot+Multi-Machine Orchestration—Robots control multiple machines simultaneously to achieve longer unattended robotic production for “lights out” manufacturing.
- Robotic Processing of Multiple Parts—Coordinated robotic production of numerous different part types or SKUs within a part family while managing multi-step processes.
- Robot Multi-Job Work Order Staging—Work order changeovers detect order completion – including FDA regulated Line Clear – and update part properties for the next order in-feed.
- Autonomous Process Control—Offset parameters adjusted in real time directly in the machine controller’s G-code for process control autonomy, improving quality and digital thread traceability.
- Future-Ready Agility—Enables the flexible adoption of new breakthroughs – such as AI-driven processes – to quickly adapt to new market realities and rapidly changing conditions.
