GelSight and Flexxbotics partner for autonomous robotic precision inspection
September 6, 2024
Tactile intelligence technology provider GelSight, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, has announced a partnership with Flexxbotics, Boston, a provider of scaled digital solutions for robot-driven manufacturing. This partnership will focus on providing a solution for robot-enabled non-destructive testing (NDT) with autonomous control, incorporating GelSight’s tactile sensing technology into Flexxbotics machinery. The resultant precise quality and digital thread traceability is anticipated to reduce inspection time by 40%.
“Together, GelSight and Flexxbotics provide a new level of inspection productivity, scrap reduction, and cost savings powered by tactile sensing and production robotics,” said GelSight CEO Youssef Benmokhtar. “Now, even the most challenging aspects to dimensionally measure accurately can be consistently inspected in a fraction of the time using robotics.”
Next-generation smart factories in industries where measurement accuracy is critical in tight tolerance processing often use industrial and collaborative robots to dramatically speed up inspection processes, increase throughput, and improve margins. GelSight’s technology uses 3D imaging to map surface finish and defects on any materials at the micron level.
By robot-enabling GelSight’s tactile sensing devices with Flexxbotics, users can quickly perform hundreds of precision measurements during processing on the production line, as opposed to transporting parts to utilise specialised lab equipment or relying on outside laboratory services.
Flexxbotics provides interoperable communication between the robots and GelSight devices to coordinate the entire process and connect directly with existing business systems in the plant — including the CAD/PLM, QMS, IIoT and others for closed-loop quality compliance. Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) for each part is automatically fed by Flexxbotics directly into the robot and GelSight programs, enabling critical characteristic measurement integrity with inspection results collected for nonconformance tracking and analysis. Optionally, data can transfer to quality repositories and MES systems of record. Flexxbotics also sends defect alerts via text and email with prior operations receiving escalations for root cause identification and processing corrections based on autonomous process control instructions from Flexxbotics.
“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,” added Tyler Bouchard, CEO & co-founder of Flexxbotics. “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 will be exhibiting at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS 2024) from September 9-14, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. The company will be located on level three, in the quality assurance section.
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