The Automated Future of Material Removal
Automating a deburring or surface finishing application is a smart, responsible, and effective way to improve a manufacturing process. ATI Industrial Automation has developed a collection of versatile material removal products and services to help you tackle the spectrum of applications, from very light finishing to heavy grinding. View this video to learn more and visit www.ati-ia.com/mr for more information.
Transcript
00:00:05 [Music] automated material removal as a market it's not just that it's emerging it's here now and it's growing and it's only growing larger so ati recognized that this is an underserved market this automated material removal represents tremendous growth opportunity and even more than that an opportunity
00:00:31 to solve problems that no one else is solving ati wants to be able to develop tooling and new technology to be able to address these problems that are holding people back ati hopes to build a future where material removal with robotics is just as ubiquitous as what we see in welding or material handling right now
00:00:47 we want this to be easy automated material removal it's really in its early stages we don't have a lot of established solutions that are just copy and paste so ati has invested in a new engineering group to be able to design and create and innovate these new products to be able to address technical
00:01:07 challenges the function of the material removal team is really unique in a sense that we've got these three core engineering positions all working together between design engineering applications engineering and the robotic test engineers our goal is to offer a complete package our design engineers
00:01:21 are developing new technologies and putting them into new tools our robotic test engineers work directly with customers to build confidence in our tools through proof of concept testing and our applications engineers are taking all that knowledge for broad support across the market so we realized that
00:01:39 we're a product company one of the things that ati understands as we look at new product development the future of our own product line to serve this market is that it has to be broad and diverse we might have to to really kind of feather a deburring operation for a sensitive part versus we might have to go the other end
00:01:56 of the spectrum and do heavy grinding and use a heavy duty abrasive and a high power tool and then everything in between so in terms of the the products we offer there's three main ways that you can classify our products uh the first of which are our axial compliant finishing tools which accomplish a lot of what you'd
00:02:11 expect from brushes sanding media polishing kind of the finer finishing on that end there's also our radially compliant tools which offer products such as our filing tool as well as a wide range of rotary tools and then finally we're developing a new line of products that involve actually adding compliance
00:02:30 to hand tools that are already out there in the market so we've invested heavily internally to be able to better serve our customers and develop new products but we have to go a step further we have to reach out to industry experts and develop partnerships to be able to provide combined solutions for this industry that includes reaching
00:02:48 out to industry leaders in the abrasives world in the cutting tool world the giants of the robot industry we have to reach out to partner integrators and form partnerships to be able to serve these customers and help customers see what's possible with robotics really the biggest challenge
00:03:03 to getting into automated material removal is you don't know what you don't know and there are so many different fields of expertise you need to have a successful integration and that's why we're building this network of integrators and bringing more into giving them the expertise so there's a wider pool of
00:03:19 resources out there to help you integrate your material removal application ati wants to support systems integrators to help them on this journey to help them grow into material removal experts with robotics and so we want to do that with proof of concept testing let us use our expertise and our
00:03:37 resources to prove to you what's possible with ati's testing services customers can get a confident product recommendation and they can understand what a certain product might be able to do on their specific parts but beyond that they're getting a chance to visualize how this robot looks how it works
00:03:53 they're able to visualize how robot might look working on their part and so they're getting that intangible confidence in automation for their specific process and their part proof of concept testing reduces the investment risk we've got the expertise in-house to really hone in applications get results that are attainable
00:04:11 and then ultimately you save time money and energy to get results that you need for your end users part so by making this investment in automated material removal ati's ultimate goal is to make robotic material removal more approachable whether you're an end user or a systems integrator
00:04:27 we want to have the technology the tools the resources so that you can invest in this space as well so that you can solve these problems so that systems integrators know that this is a growth opportunity for them and so if we're able to accomplish that goal everybody wins end users win systems integrators grow
00:04:45 and expand their business ati grows and has an opportunity to continue innovating in the market you