How Universal Robots doubled production at Tegra Medical

Tegra Medical explains how the installation of Universal Robots had doubled production and enabled the company to keep up with customer demand.

Medical device manufacturer Tegra Medical faced profit erosion as costs went up and customers demanded price cuts. Deploying three collaborative robot arms from Universal doubled throughput, freed up 11 full-time positions and enabled the manufacturer to keep up with customer demand.

At Tegra Medical’s main production facility in Franklin, Massachusetts, a novel robotic cell is working next to employees, producing components for a meniscal repair device.

“It’s an unusual for us and it’s 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 Medical.

The robot arm performing the machine tending is a UR10 from Universal Robots. With a reach of 51 inches, it picks 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 the repair device.

According to Paul Quitzau, senior engineering manager at Tegra, setting up the machining cycle is about timing: “The UR10 starts with the slowest cycle first, then goes on to the next. It’s like popping bread in the toaster and making your eggs in the interim, then having everything finish at the same time.”

This mixed model cell unusual in the industry, and the fact that the robot can operate with no safety guarding next to employees is a radical break from traditional industrial robots that stay fenced off from humans.

“The new collaborative class series robots had just come out, when we started looking into automation. We really thought that was something beneficial as we wanted to put a lot of our operations together in mini-cells in confined work spaces where operators have to interface with the automation. Erecting big cages if it was a regular industrial robot wouldn’t have been advantageous to what we were trying to do,” said Blenkhorn.

Before Tegra built the UR10 robotic cell, it started out with two smaller cells each tended by a UR5 robot arm, UR10’s ‘little brother’, featuring same 4 mils repeatability but with a reach of 33.5 inches. The UR5 picks up the blank from the feeder and then moves it between the lathe, the grinder and the conveyor in a cycle that now takes only 10 seconds compared with the 22 seconds it took with manual labour.

“We were looking at cost, accuracy, ease of implementation and ease of use. The Universal Robots seem to nail it in all those areas; the price point for what they were offering was extremely competitive, the accuracy and the design was just far above and beyond what we thought anyone else in the market had,” said Blenkhorn.

Built-in safety protects operators

The UR robots are classified as collaborative due to their built-in safety system that makes the robot arm automatically stop operating if it encounters objects or people in its route. This feature enables humans and robots to work side-by-side without the fencing that’s usually required with traditional industrial robots.

Avoided changes to the process

The types of activities Tegra wanted to automate first were the high volume, repetitive motion type processes.

“Being in the medical industry, we were up against process change controls. We can’t be changing our process without notifying our customers and going through validation activity. But by simply replacing the operator with the robot, we essentially didn’t change the process. We just changed the handling of components in-between the processes. That was a huge win for us,” said Blenkhorn.

 “We can offer our customers the price reductions that go with that, we can keep up with production demand, and we’re not really burdening anyone with additional qualifications and validation activities.”

Nobody loses their job to a robot

The tangible benefits of the robot implementation is the doubling of throughput and the freeing up of 11 full time positions.

“Obviously when you mention robots, people think they’re going to potentially lose their job. In 2014, our CEO told us that our facility was going to become the robotics centre of excellence for the Tegra Medical platform – but that nobody would lose their job to a robot,” said Blenkhorn.

Instead, Tegra has repurposed the operators into other processes and operations to keep up with company growth.

“When we see an operator that does nothing but load a part every 10 or 20 seconds, we try to put more value add to them by training them new skills, whether it’s a different operation or by having them become the robot supervisor in that area.”