Flexxbotics
Flexxbotics partners GelSight.
Flexxbotics has announced its partnership with GelSight. The duo is set to work on a joint solution for robot-enabled non-destructive testing (NDT) with autonomous process control. Combining GelSight’s tactile sensing technology with Flexxbotics’ advanced robotic machine solution, the new solution will provide precise quality inspection and digital thread traceability. The overall aim of the solution is to reduce time-to-inspect by 40% or more.
“Together GelSight and Flexxbotics provide a new level of inspection productivity, scrap reduction, and cost savings using tactile sensing and production robotics,” said Youssef Benmokhtar, CEO of GelSight. “Now, even the most challenging aspects to dimensionally measure accurately can be consistently inspected in a fraction of the time using robotics.”
Tyler Bouchard, CEO & Co-founder of Flexxbotics, added, “We believe robot-driven manufacturing is the future, and our partnership with GelSight combines some of the most advanced automated inspection capabilities on the planet with Flexxbotics production robotic orchestration for next-level factory autonomy. Using GelSight tactile sensing to inspect during production enables robots to achieve micron-scale measurement accuracy bringing autonomous process control with Flexxbotics to the most complex geometry parts.”
GelSight improves inspection efficiency
Smart factories within the aerospace, defence, medical device, and automotive industries are now able to utilise industrial robots and collaborative robots to aid with measurement accuracy levels in tight tolerance processing. Benefits including quicker inspection processes, increased throughput, and better margins are also possible. Technologies like GelSight’s utilise 3D imaging to map the surface finish and defects on any material, even at the micron level.
The tactile intelligence technology specialist will combine its solutions with Flexxbotics to allow users to quickly perform hundreds of precision measurements throughout the entire production line.
Flexxbotics provides versatile communication capabilities
Whereas Flexxbotics will provide communication between the robots and GelSight’s devices to coordinate the entire process. Additionally, the solution can also be connected to existing business systems including the CAD/PLM, QMS, IIoT and other closed-loop quality compliance solutions.
Flexxbotics also feeds Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) directly into the robot and GelSight programs to ensure critical characteristic measurement integrity of inspection results. Data can also be transferred to quality repositories and MES systems of record. Users can receive defect alerts either via email or text, with root cause(s) and corrections indicated based on autonomous process controls.