you ever have one of those days...

[jseger]

                        

 

         

you ever have one of those days.  where you just want to smash something.   

you know, i don't ever have any problems with robots around here ever.  and everytime something goes wrong everyone blames the robots.     

they want to set up an automatic cell so they buy a robot, but don't spend any money one anything else.  i mean we even build our own safety fence.  so they just expect the robot to do everything and anything.

i've been in manufacturing automation for 10 years and it never ever changes.  "we never have enough money."     well someone has enough money and if we don't do it they will.  i'm going to go relax.    

[CRachek]

I can be that other happy face toasting a beer with you because I can feel your pain.

My favorite one is when the robot has crashed into the wall of the machine and the operator will tell me that the robot "just took off by itself".  I know that the robot has been running the same program for years and never had an issue, then only to later find out that someone was manually jogging the robot and crashed it.

Instead of telling me the truth they let me spend hours looking at the robot trying to figure out how it could have taken off by itself.

[Fabian Munoz]

or when the process is controlled by a PLC and the robot crashes because it was sent to do the wrong job and everybody look at you with the "why did YOU crash the robot" look.

Helloooooooooo, the robot's been running for months, it does wht the PLC tells it to do, check the PLC code

[jseger]

I know all about the robot idiosincracies.  They robot runs fine all day and then on second shift it tears the door off the machine or another robot welds the part to the fixture.  And nobody knows what happened.     (that is someone fiddling with the robot.)

    (this is me finding out someone was fiddling with the robot)

[mgarner]

I think I know this one too, I designed a robot cell to fit the isolation rubbers on car exhausts with a custom gripper (EOAT) system that I designed. Anyway a few weeks after it was installed we got a call saying "the robot" decided to smash into the tooling ripping off my EOAT.

Like the robot did it, yeah right, 

The robot cell had several safety systems etc

Anyway I think somebody kicked the companies robot maintenance team up the arse  for trying to reduce operating time, they must have been daft as my cell did the whole exhaust rubber insertion plus printing onto the exhaust in 2 minutes, they expected it would take it 6mins

[Fabian Munoz]

It is hard to cool down in the heat of the moment during a crash but last week watching  the robot running production (It has several weeks already) there was an "incident" while few people were watching, and you know that split second when everybody looks at you, well, my brain was quicker than the "judges" and I said:


          "SOMEBODY LOCATED THE PART IN THE ROBOT PATH"

then, there was a moment of silence, manager came, checked and of course, the part was out of place. They put the part in place and production continued as usual.

Robot programmer    1,             Customer      0