Over the next five years, electronics manufacturing is projected to grow globally at a rate of nearly 12 percent and accounts for an average of over four thousand robot installations per year in the United States from 2018-2020.  With recent supply chain issues hitting the electronics industry hard, many companies are looking to bring production operations back to the United States further streamline their operations.

As a result, there is an ever-rising need for flexible automation to aid this growth and take over the repetitive and boring tasks that human workers may find taking up the majority of their day.  Many in the industry are seeing a renewed focus on improvements in production quality and yield of consumer devices, semiconductors, fiber optics, and industrial equipment products.  One such method for this improvement is through the implementation and use of robot arms armed with intelligent sensor solutions.

As the electronics industry begins to further embrace robotics as a tool for improving productivity, there is a growing need for these new partners to be very user-friendly and easily integrated into production processes.

One such way an industrial robot can be more user-friendly is by having an existing ecosystem in place with all necessary components already determined and ready to be activated at a moment's notice.  This could include the robot itself, the grippers, and vision solutions.

The major advantage of robot solutions (like Mecademic's Meca500 arm) is that they does not require a significant amount of programming or robotics knowledge to get them going.  In fact, that’s one of the main advantages of the Meca500 robot – its simplified programming environment requires no proprietary language to program.  This makes it more accessible and easily programmable than industrial robots on the market today.

High-Mix-Low-Volume manufacturing is a growing trend that we're seeing in electronics manufacturing. This may make you think that a unique and complex solution is required to automate, but in reality the solution is much simpler.

Don't get us wrong, it does require a different approach than high volume production with low variability. To be successful in deploying automation in these environments, the key is flexibility and low transition time in between runs.  This is where flexible automation flourishes, and the benefits of having invested in re-deployable assets become undeniable.

With Mecademic's small robot arm, the Meca500, the system is user friendly, connected, precise, and offers flexibility in integration. This allows users to get the system up-and-running without significant engineering effort.  In turn, this saves the business precious time money, let alone the headache of it all.  

• Integrated, simplified controllers

• Very small with a compact footprint

• Extremely precise with a repeatability of 5 micrometers

• Hardware and software agnostic system with a simplified programming environment requiring no proprietary programming language and supporting multiple interfaces (TCP/IP, EtherNetIP, EtherCAT) natively.

• Flexible installation that can be mounted in any position you want, even upside down or sideways

• Free firmware updates included

• Low power consumption