Hi guys. Today was part travel and part training. We took an early flight from Tokyo to Ube and then a short van ride to Sanyo Onoda City – home of Fuji Robotics. The class is being lead by Michael Smilansky, Fuji Robotics Engineering Manager out of the Redmond Washington office. Supporting the class is Hiroshi Nishide, Fuji Robotics General Manager also out of the Redmond office. There are three of us in the class. The other two gentlemen are from Rethceif Packaging in Indiana and Reikes Material Handling in Iowa.
Today started with a tour of the Fuji plant. This included seeing everything from raw parts inventory, to basic assembly of components, to final assembly and testing. There were quite a few “systems” being manufactured, meaning a robot with end-effecter as well as adjoining conveyor, etc. Fuji really focuses on selling only the robot in the US, whereas they offer more turnkey solutions to the Japanese market – obviously a cost motivated strategy.
The afternoon was spent getting introduced to the training material, learning terminology, and doing some basic interaction with the robot. I had my first opportunity to manually maneuver a test robot using the teaching pendant, which was cool. We learned the concept of how to sequence the placement of goods on a pallet. Tomorrow we will put those concepts into action and program a robot first hand to pick in a sequence, position by position.
The time I felt was most valuable today was simply inspecting the guts of the robot. By this I mean being able to look at a finished robot without the cover on – like having the hood up on your car. I could see first-hand the 4 servo motors that drive the 4 axes of rotation. I could see the limit switches that govern the amount of rotational travel. I could see the lubrication points used during routine service. We’re still very much in the beginning stages of the training here, but we’re off to a productive start.
Mike Holler, PeakLogix Engineer
Tags: Fuji Robotics Palletizer