With the current ongoing labor shortage, skilled welders are in short supply leaving many businesses to rely more heavily on robotics to fill that void.  Fully automating a 24/7 welding operation is not as complicated or as intimidating as it may sound. What if the production line requires multiple stations or has to handle different metal types? 

Midwest Engineered System built a fully automated assembly line that required no manual labor to perform the assembly operation. Robots using a vision system would pick and sort the multiple types of triggers as they travel on a single conveyor. On a separate conveyor, filled bottles would arrive at the bottle assembly station.

When you're riding on the subway, most people don't think about how the cart they are riding in was assembled much less the process behind it. MWES built a robotic welding system that would allow a single robot on an overhead gantry to work in tandem with human workers safely.

Automation systems come in a variety of sizes. Some are small enough to process sensitive medical operations. They scale up from there to robotic systems that can process parts the size or weight of a car and beyond.

Automating high volume production operations is relatively straight forward: design a specialized machine that only produces one part. The rest of the time is spent to make it robust enough to do it at speed and for a long time before service.

In the automation world, many times it’s the gripper that packs the most innovation on a system. The grippers are where the automation system actually interacts with the products moving through the cell.

Many don’t realize that robot arms can be equipped with an EOAT that is capable of cleanly grabbing multiple products at once. Our custom designed robot gripper made this palletizing process a breeze.

Economies are opening up and demand for many products and services are surging. It’s predicted that most companies will see massive demand for their products in the near future, if it hasn’t happened already.

Knowing when to automate processes can be a tricky prospect. When looking at replacing a highly skilled, yet difficult to fill human operation like production welding with robotic systems, the question can become even more murky.

We’ve put together three important truths about collaborative robots that a manufacturing engineer or manager should understand before taking the plunge on a cobot for their processes.

A part of what we pride ourselves at Midwest Engineered Systems is keeping up to speed on the latest technologies in automation. With that in mind, we’ve brought in one of FANUC’s latest collaborative robots from the CRX series of industrial robots.

Knowing exactly how tight tolerances need to be can go a long way in reducing production system costs. Over-specifying tolerances will move integrators from more cost-effective machines to expensive, highly-specialized equipment.

This month Midwest Engineered Systems is celebrating 30 years in the automation industry. MWES started in 1991 by Scott Woida, and has grown to be a leading provider of automation systems for a large cross-section of industries.

Over the course of their lifetime, production line automation systems begin to lose efficiency. Replacing with a completely new system would definitely improve throughput and would bring the machine production tracking technology up to date.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Midwest Engineered Systems developed cost effective, high throughput vial filling systems for COPAN Diagnostics Inc.

Putting together an RFQ or even earnestly exploring automation, is a job unto itself. It can be difficult to know what an automation integrator may need to start the process. Providing the right information helps develop a quote package.

There’s plenty of machine tending systems on the market, but how do the parts arrive to these systems? Chances are, there’s a large amount of manual labor being used to unload pallets and bins to feed them.

MWES offers UR robot system service on-site to get the most out of your robotic arm without wasting months learning how to program them yourself.

Moving toward automating production facilities that have a few or more lines can be an overwhelming prospect. Each line may need upgrades. Judging which should receive more of the budget is a task that may not have a clear cut solution.

Next level production performance and control with our automated storage and retrieval buffer system built expressly for existing manufacturing facilities.