Medical device manufacturer, Tegra Medical, has recently deployed three robot arms from Universal Robots (UR) at their facility in Franklin, Mass. The robots freed up 11 full time workers, who now handling more complex tasks, and improved product quality. Tegra’s ROI from these three robot arms happened in three to six months.

Employing three collaborative robot arms from UR to tend the machines manufacturing medical instruments doubled throughput, freed up 11 full time positions and enabled the manufacturer to keep up with customer demand while keeping costs down. Tegra has now repurposed the operators relieved from machine tending into other processes to keep up with company growth.

“It is an unusual for us and it is unusual in the industry to have a mixed model cell like this feeding three different products simultaneously in the same machining cycle,” said Hal Blenkhorn, director of engineering at Tegra, describing Tegra’s new robotic cell featuring a UR10 from UR.

These robots, two UR5 robots and one UR10 robot, each tend machining cells that produce artery closure devices and Meniscal repair devices. The two UR5s pick up blanks from the feeder, move them between a lathe, a grinder and a conveyor in a cycle that now takes only 10 sec. compared with the 22 sec. with manual labor. The UR10 robotic cell is an unusual, mixed model cell feeding three different part numbers simultaneously in the same machining cycle.

With a reach of 51 in., the robot manages to pick up blanks from three different hoppers, feeding two of them into two grinders while the third product goes into a lathe where an internal cutting tool creates a bevel edge on the end of a Meniscal repair device.

Tegra Medical
www.tegramedical.com

Universal Robots
www.universal-robots.com