Functional Prototyping at ABB Robotics

By replacing traditional production methods with in-house solutions, 3D printing gives businesses around the world the opportunity to save time and money. ABB Robotics turned to the Ultimaker 2 Extended+ for making prototype fingers for their robot YuMi, bringing new opportunities to the company. Compared to the traditional aluminum fingers, which were very costly and took about 5 weeks for each iteration, the 3D printed designs cost almost nothing and took about an hour to create.

Transcript

00:00:03 I am Guillaume Pradels, I'm working for ABB robotics and I'm using 3D printing to prototype fingers for our robot called YuMi Here at ABB we are developing industrial robots YuMi is a collaborative industrial robot that has been designed to work alongside humans It is dedicated to small parts assembly in the electronics industry or automative industry but it can do other kinds of applications too It needs very different shapes of the fingers to grab parts and pick and place, and do insertions and assembly We were developing the fingers here, for the YuMi, on the 3D side and then we had to make them, so we went through the traditional means of producing fingers

00:01:00 with external providers, and it was taking a lot of time and it cost a certain amount of money So we started to search for alternatives We found out it was very, very easy to print them instead of having them milled for example, which takes a lot of time When we came to the idea of 3D printing, at the beginning people were sceptical but I went to a fair, with a 3D model on a USB stick, and I got it printed and then I brought it back here at ABB and when they saw the results they were very happy and convinced It is very important for us because customers are asking for a lot of tests and feasability studies so we can do a lot more tests than we would be able to do without the 3D printing solution

00:01:57 The most benefit to having the fingers 3D printed? The cost of production is very low and it's very, very quick to do the prototyping from the 3D model to the object It's a couple of hours I think there are many, many good things about the Ultimaker, the first of all is Cura Cura just works straight-out-of-the-box: you throw your 3D model in and you just select the basic profile and then you print and you're done. But if you want to go a bit further you can also dig into the parameters and have something very, very accurate for what you need Another thing about the Ultimaker is the quality of the print, it's very good. And you just tell the printer and you forget it, and you always have the same high quality, over and over and it's very important for us to be constant on quality

00:02:50 The 3D printing, overall, sped up our process from several weeks to a few days So it leads to an opportunity for us to do more tests, for more customers