But the robot also needs to move fast enough to provide customers with the cycle times we wanted,” explained Prahlad. “Meeting Stackit’s ‘twenty times faster’ productivity goals rely heavily on the inertia of the gripper and ensuring that the settling time of the robot remained accurate. What’s more, because Grabit’s electroadhesion gripper is so large, the robot needed to be able to withstand a big moment of inertia and offer the ability to rotate accurately.”ĭespite initial excitement, the off-the-shelf Shibaura Machine robot that the company experimented with, did not meet Grabit’s requirements. “Because of the vast applications for Stackit, we needed a robot with a large reach, that would not lose the high levels of precision needed for exacting material handling applications like the shoes from Nike. “The process looked at several factors,” explained Prahlad. This prior understanding of industrial robots enabled us to fine tune our requirements before approaching any manufacturers.”Īfter selecting a handful of potential robot manufacturers, Grabit planned an extensive test and selection procedure to examine the potential of each one. “Two members of our team already had extensive experience in robot design, and both had been involved in the development of several SCARA robots. “Choosing the wrong robot could have a detrimental effect on the entire design of the system,” explained Greg Miller, president and CEO of Grabit. Having seen a Shibaura Machine robot arm used to mount one of its grippers by a customer - a Japanese circuit board manufacturer - Grabit was intrigued to see how the robot manufacturer’s machines could be used as a larger part of Stackit’s development. The creation of Stackit began in summer 2015, but before the manufacturing process could begin, the company needed to decide on the right robot to mount the revolutionary electroadhesive gripper on. Its return on investment period would be just two years. The new system would ultimately be able to assemble precise layers, such as those found in the Nike shoe upper, twenty times faster than a human being. Using Stackit, Nike can manufacture 600 pairs of shoes in just one eight-hour shift. made an investment in the company and later became one of the first customers to buy its materials handling robot system, Stackit. Following Grabit’s inception in 2013, Nike Inc. However, upon identifying that materials handling was responsible for 60 to 80 percent of labour in manufacturing, he decided that it should be the first application in which he applied the technology. Prahlad and company now hold 36 separate patents related to electroadhesion and the total number of patents issued, pending, granted and applied for is 75. When charged correctly, the electrodes create an electric field that adheres to nearly any surface, allowing the robot gripper to pick up the part that is being handled. The process uses a flat pad of electrodes to generate positive and negative charges on the surface. The concept of electroroadhesion was discovered at non-profit organization, SRI International, by Grabit’s co-founder and chief technology and products officer, Dr. Instead, the start-up harnesses static electricity - referred to as electroroadhesion - to handle materials in a way no robot has before. However, Grabit’s technology allows a machine to do this in as little as 50 seconds.ĭespite its evocative name, Grabit’s material handling invention does not mimic the human grabbing motion present in many robots. For a human worker, arranging the pieces of material can take up to 20 minutes. Assembling a pair of Nikes requires as many as 40 pieces of material to be stacked and heated to create the upper - the flexible part that sits on top of your foot. Material handling is one of the most labour-intensive and expensive aspects of manufacturing, and when dealing with an array of different materials, the process is impossible to automate. Hatched in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Sunnyvale, California, robotics start-up Grabit is harnessing static electricity, machine learning and automation from Shibaura Machine partner, TM Robotics, to do just that. But, imagine if you could harness the same static cling to handle a material as fragile as an egg, as flimsy as soft fabric - or to assemble the uppers of Nike trainers at 20 times the pace of a human worker. Demonstrating static electricity by using a charged balloon to levitate your hair is a classic science experiment.
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