Flexxbotics reports that SpiTrex Orthopedics (SpiTrex), a specialist in global medical device contract manufacturing, has selected the Flexxbotics solution for robot-driven manufacturing with autonomous process control in its Foba laser marking workcells.

The Flexxbotics solution enables robots to communicate directly with the Foba laser marking system and change jobs in real-time and within sequence, reducing changeover time to 10 minutes, twice a week. The robots also connect with the vision system, verifying the laser marking on each part to sortautonomously based on the results, thus ensuring closed-loop quality for higher yields.

“Flexxbotics is the only robot machine-tending software solution we found capable of delivering the precision, cycle time and closed-loop compliance required,” says Brett Gopal, senior vice president of operations at SpiTrex Orthopedics. “We’re impressed with Flexxbotics’ autonomous process control using robots, and the ability to close-the-loop by alerting upstream and downstream workcells of quality problems based on automated inspection results, which is quite unique.”

Software by Flexxbotics directs the robots to use the Cognex camera images to determine the pass/fail status of each part, sending alerts with the images to pre- and post-process workcells upon detecting non-conformance issues that need correcting.

Flexxbotics changes jobs in real-time and within sequence, enabling job change-over at SpiTrex in less than 10 minutes, as opposed to requiring an hour or more of an engineer’s time to set-up the workcell for a new job.

“The autonomous changeover process, coupled with the closed feedback loop functionality, enables us to produce extremely high tolerance parts through continuous flow which reduces the overall lead time by over 20%,” says Gopal.

For further information www.flexxbotics.com