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better production Shops Using Technology easy to integrate. If you can write a to-do list, you can program this robot." From a programming perspective, Mr. Strange says the tablet inter face is one of the most significant benefits of the UR5 robot. It enables him to stay with the robot and troubleshoot along Universal Robots, call 631-610-9664 or visit universal-robots.com. 122 MMS September 2013 mmsonline.com the way rather than running a simulation, and later return to the shop floor to boot up the robot and watch it perform in real-time. To realize maximum production benefits when the UR5 was used with a mandrel tube bender, adjustments needed to be made. For instance, the RSS team found the robot's fast operation to be problematic when feeding tubes into the machine. "We had not expected the robot to be able to operate so fast," Mr. Escalette says. "It pushed the limits of the mandrel bender so much that hydraulics in the bender overheated and started to malfunction." Howeve r, before the e q uip m e nt m a l f u nctioned, it was able to produce 1,500 pieces in 4 hours. With manual labor, it would've taken two employees 3 days to achieve that level of productivity. The company has since optimized the be nde r to keep up with the robot, Mr. Escalette says. So far, the UR5 has worked with a Hurco CNC mac hine a nd a mandrel tube bender. The next job the UR5 will perform at RSS will be buffing and polishing. " What initially got us excited about the UR robots is their ability to exert a certain amount of pressure through the advanced force control feature. It's very hard to find employees who can manually polish brass fittings, and now we use the robot for this task," Mr. Escalette says. He admits that his