It all started when Phil Allor, president of Selflube, a Michigan-based mold component supplier, returned from NPE 2018. On the flight back, he sketched out a plan-logically but not practically-to add automation into his operation. Allor then met with several robot integrators, and all of them turned him down, saying it was not doable. So, he set out to do it himself. "We found that this was mainly a software problem. Conventionally, to do one part number in a robot cell requires one CNC program and one robot program. But we intended to have a robot cell capable of doing about 2,000 part numbers with many part number changes during the day. That potentially meant that we would need 2,000 CNC programs and 2,000 robot programs. Creating and maintaining all these programs would have been undoable, and in that sense, the robot integrators were right. But to us, not doable meant that we had to find another way," Allor explains.
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