Tag: robitics

FANUC opens first dedicated Irish robotics facility in response to growing manufacturing demand

In response to increased demand from its Irish customer base, leading robotics and automation company FANUC will officially open the doors to its first ever dedicated facility in Ireland on 11th October 2022. Located in Maynooth, Co Kildare, the unveiling of the 500m2 training centre and showroom will be overseen by FANUC’s European President & CEO Shinichi Tanzawa in the presence of a select group of local dignitaries, academics, government officials, press, system integrator partners and valued customers. 

“We are delighted to announce the opening of our first Irish facility,” states Tom Bouchier, Managing Director of FANUC UK & Ireland. “Not only does it demonstrate our long-term commitment to our growing customer base in the country, but it also enables us to support the government’s aim to place Ireland at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by 2025.”

Live robot demonstrations

The official opening will provide the perfect platform for a live demonstration of the recently released LR-10iA; FANUC’s lightweight, strong and compact robot series. Perfect for use in confined workspaces, the LR-10iA is suitable for all types of material handling applications, such as loading/unloading directly in a machine tool, or high-speed picking and packaging directly on a conveyor belt. Visitors to the Maynooth facility opening in October will be able to witness its full range of benefits at close quarters.

As well as the LR-10iA, the new showroom will be stocked with a range of robotics and automation solutions for demonstration, evaluation and test purposes. Latest FANUC innovations on display will include the CRX cobot range, a series of lightweight collaborative robots that boast eight years zero maintenance; and the ROBODRILL vertical machining centre, delivering precision and repeatability making it perfect for fully automated production runs.

Local, on the ground support

The new Maynooth facility will be supported by a five-strong team of dedicated staff with the ability to provide local technical support and servicing, with a view to increasing this into double figures over the next two years. The site will also host organised, in-house training for FANUC’s larger customers and scheduled courses catering for smaller groups; previously, Irish clients would have had to travel to Coventry in England. In addition, the company will continue to develop its strong ties with Ireland’s higher education network, including the Technical Universities. 

The drive towards Industry 4.0

Located just 45 minutes’ drive from Dublin and within a 90-minute radius of many of FANUC’s Irish customers and partners, the Maynooth facility is accessible from most of the island in about three hours, making it the ideal location for FANUC’s Irish HQ. Its launch could not be timelier, coinciding with the implementation of the Irish Government’s wider industrial strategy, ‘Ireland’s Industry 4.0 Strategy 2020-2025’. Ireland currently lags behind the European average in robot penetration, with the second-lowest robot density in the EU15 in 2019. However, the Government’s strategy is that, by 2025, Ireland will be a competitive, innovation-driven manufacturing hub and at the forefront of Industry 4.0 development and adoption. With several hundred FANUC robots already installed in Ireland, the new facility at Maynooth means the company is ideally placed to help Irish businesses close the gap and profit from the new opportunities, supported by its network of expert integrator partners. 

“The indicators are very strongly pointing towards more investment in manufacturing equipment in Ireland,” says Tom Bouchier. “The country’s technologically advanced, efficient and competitive future manufacturing sector and its supply chain is one that FANUC Ireland will be at heart of.”

3D printed fingertip ‘feels’ like human skin

A highly sensitive, 3D-printed fingertip could help robots become more dexterous and improve the performance of prosthetic hands by giving them an in-built sense of touch.

Machines can beat the world’s best chess player, but they cannot handle a chess piece as well as an infant. This lack of robot dexterity is partly because artificial grippers lack the fine tactile sense of the human fingertip, which is used to guide our hands as we pick up and handle objects.

Two papers published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface give the first in-depth comparison of an artificial fingertip with neural recordings of the human sense of touch. The research was led by Professor of Robotics & AI (Artificial Intelligence), Nathan Lepora, from the University of Bristol’s Department of Engineering Maths and based at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

“Our work helps uncover how the complex internal structure of human skin creates our human sense of touch. This is an exciting development in the field of soft robotics – being able to 3D-print tactile skin could create robots that are more dexterous or significantly improve the performance of prosthetic hands by giving them an in-built sense of touch,” said Professor Lepora.

Cut-through section of 3D printed tactile skin

Professor Lepora and colleagues created the sense of touch in the artificial fingertip using a 3D-printed mesh of pin-like papillae on the underside of the compliant skin, which mimic the dermal papillae found between the outer epidermal and inner dermal layers of human tactile skin. The papillae are made on advanced 3D-printers that can mix together soft and hard materials to create complicated structures like those found in biology.

“We found our 3D-printed tactile fingertip can produce artificial nerve signals that look like recordings from real, tactile neurons. Human tactile nerves transmit signals from various nerve endings called mechanoreceptors, which can signal the pressure and shape of a contact. Classic work by Phillips and Johnson in 1981 first plotted electrical recordings from these nerves to study ‘tactile spatial resolution’ using a set of standard rigid shapes used by psychologists. In our work, we tested our 3D-printed artificial fingertip as it ‘felt’ those same rigid shapes and discovered a startlingly close match to the neural data,” said Professor Lepora

“For me, the most exciting moment was when we looked at our artificial nerve recordings from the 3D-printed fingertip and they looked like the real recordings from over 40 years ago! Those recordings are very complex with hills and dips over edges and ridges, and we saw the same pattern in our artificial tactile data,” said Professor Lepora.

While the research found a remarkably close match between the artificial fingertip and human nerve signals, it was not as sensitive to fine detail. Professor Lepora suspects this is because the 3D-printed skin is thicker than real skin and his team is now exploring how to 3D-print structures on the microscopic scale of human skin.

“Our aim is to make artificial skin as good – or even better – than real skin,” said Professor Lepora.