When introduced to the UR cobot by its distributor, Inaba Denki Sangyo Co., Ltd., Matsunami Glass was attracted by the robot’s ability to work with people without the need for safety fences. That means they don’t need to worry any more for the additional cost and effort to call in a system manufacturer to make any layout changes.

Matsunami Glass first introduced the robot to the glass plate feeding section of the machine. “It was , but the robot was easy to operate and the start-up went smoothly,” says Kazuma Kuji, Deputy Chief Engineer of the Production Engineering Group, explaining how distributor Inaba Denki invited him to their center for robot training, teaching him how to create a program. After the initial training, the distributor also came on site to help with the final deployment.  In this process, glass is fed either on the front or back side, depending on the situation. “The UR robot has a ±360° range of motion for each axis, which allowed us to faithfully reproduce the human operation of rotating and flipping large sheets of glass,” explains Kuji.