When you think of low-cost automation, what comes to mind? What about cobots for under $7,000?

While Igus is perhaps best known for motion plastics manufacturing, the company’s RBTX platform aims to help end users find the most cost-effective automation solutions within 30 minutes. During an in-person podcast held at the Igus’ robotics lab, Jan Hennecke, Robotics Product Manager at Igus joined TECH B2B Marketing’s Jimmy Carroll to discuss the genesis of RBTX and how it aims to save time and money for those looking to adopt automation.

They also discuss the industries where low-cost automation may benefit, along with the latest trends and technologies in industrial automation today, including AI, the labor shortage, ease of use, and much more.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:06] Hi, everybody. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing. And welcome to this episode of the “Manufacturing Matters” podcast, where we aim to discuss the trends and technologies shaping the manufacturing industry today. I have the pleasure of being joined by Jan Hennecke, who’s a robotics product manager at Igus. Jan, thank you so much for having me here today. Really appreciate it.

Jan Hennecke: [00:00:26] Yeah, thanks for coming, Jimmy. It’s good to have you here. Today is a big day for us. We have our official opening of the robotics campus of Igus here in Rumford, Rhode Island. And you can see there’s, the preparations are still ongoing. So we’ll have a lot of people here that are prepping our area here. But we’ll dive a little bit deeper into all the different things that we’re doing and what we have here.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:48] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You took the words out of my mouth. So I, you know, for those in the industrial automation space, I think most people probably know Igus, but… RBTX… Well, for those who don’t know, tell us a little bit about Igus and then a little bit about RBTX and what’s going on here.

Jan Hennecke: [00:01:04] Yeah. So, Igus is a German company. We have about 4500 employees worldwide. And basically this is the North American headquarters here in Rumford, Rhode Island. We have about 500 employees here. We do many, many things, from flex cables, energy chains. So basically cable management and industrial application over lubrication-free bushings and all kinds of other motion that you can provide with plastics that are self-lubricating, so you don’t need to grease them. That’s a very important part when you talk to Igus. So that’s what Igus is doing. But then Igus also has a robotics division that is based on that lubrication-free technology, which we call low-cost automation. Because if you use plastics that are high-performance plastics, you can injection mold them and you get a lot of cost efficiencies out of that.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:01:54] Yeah. One thing that caught my eye when we came in, there was a large tablet-type device, right? And there’s a… I won’t name any names, but there’s one of your cobots and it lists the price. And then there’s another cobot and it lists the price. And I said, “what’s going on there?” So, low-cost automation indeed. This being the “Manufacturing Matters” podcast, I like to ask a little bit about some of the observations you have on the overall industry today. So what are some of the main pain points you see in manufacturing today, including labor shortage? That’s an obvious one, but it’s still something that’s persisting right?

Jan Hennecke: [00:02:26] Yeah. So I think that the industry has done a great job of, you know, developing the technology towards towards manufacturing. But mostly it was focused on automotive. So you can see that, you know, whatever automotive needs will be solved by industrial automation. But, I think there’s a big lack for all the other applications that are actually quite straightforward. So you can see that the technology has kind of like developed towards automotive applications. And then from there has specialized into more complicated applications. But who’s left behind was the person or the company that does the simple stuff. And you can see that because most of the robots have become very performant and, you know, they’re very good robots, there’s very good solutions out in the market for technology problems that are very difficult. But what’s completely missing, in my opinion, is the easy stuff. What if you just want to take a part and place it to the other side and you can’t spend $50,000 on that? So that’s a little bit what we’re seeing, is that there’s a need for the simple stuff.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:03:29] Yeah, yeah. And I want to dive into that a little bit later when I ask you about  small- and medium-sized enterprise businesses, right, and what’s going on there in terms of automation. But just to go back a little bit to the RBTX and the low-cost automation idea, talk to me a little bit more about that. Like, how does systems integration factor in? Do you offer that? Is that something that you partner with people or…

Jan Hennecke: [00:03:49] Yeah, that’s a great question. So we find that it’s one way to reduce the cost of the hardware. That’s great. You reduce the cost of the hardware. The total cost of your system goes down. But then on the other side, you have to pay somebody to program it. So in most cases that fee might even be higher than the fee of the actual components itself. So those are two areas that we have to work on. What we see is that our ideal… In our ideal world, we can offer trainings and increase the competency inside the companies to do self-integration and self-managed teams. So, to have your own automation team. I know that this sounds a little crazy. And you know, for many people it might take a little bit to get there. But the idea really is like, how can we get started with easy automation and a really simple task? And then as a partner of your business, how can we bring your company to a level where you can integrate your own systems? So how we want to achieve that is we have very simple robots, but we also have normal industry robots. And then we can pair those with trainings and integration services. So for your first system you might need it fully integrated. But then you have that in your facility, and from there you can teach your people. They can learn from it, they gain experience from it. So that  second system, you might only get 90% integrated and you do the final touch  ups. Or, you do the reprogramming or something like that. Up to a point… Where at some point you might only need some, you know, some consulting for the right components or something like that, and then you do the rest yourself.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:05:20] Yeah. So this is very interesting, right? It’s like… It’s not just Igus products either. You walk in this room, and you see a board with all of your different partners, and you walk around the room and you see different robots, there’s Igus, there’s Epson, there’s Fanuc, there’s others. How does this compare to like a UR+ ecosystem? You’re not… You’re obviously not just trying to find a unique way to sell Igus products. You’re almost like democratizing automation for people.

Jan Hennecke: [00:05:44] Yeah, that’s a good question. And thank you. So the idea is that we started our own robotics line. We call those the low-cost robots. You can see the prices everywhere. They’re really very affordable. Not to say that they are the same performance level than other robots. What we really are trying to do is lowering the cost of robots and then seeing how much performance do we still get out of them. So that’s not good for every application. But we want to help everyone. So the idea is how about partnering up with other companies that have very unique value propositions. For example, a robot that is very precise. A robot that is really fast. A robot that is really strong. And then partner together so that we can offer the customer the best robot for their application.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:06:30] I’d like to circle back now to what I was going to ask about before: About small- and medium-sized enterprises, right? I think a lot of the growth opportunities in industrial automation are probably in these areas. Like large manufacturers——not universally——but many of them are probably already using a lot of automation, certainly automotive. You mentioned that. And automation has long served the automotive space. But in terms of making automation systems, you know, available to small- and medium-sized enterprises—— this is a very interesting concept. Would you say that the RBTX and the low-cost automation platform, was it designed with these small- and medium-sized enterprises in mind or just everybody?

Jan Hennecke: [00:07:12] Yeah, I think everybody finds value in it long term. Really, the problem we want to solve is, how can we get the first robot into your facility? How do you deploy the first robot, the first automation cells? Over the last couple of weeks I’ve visited many, many companies and typically the experience is the same. We have so many applications, we don’t know where to start. We also don’t know how because it’s very expensive. So, I would say our main goal is, how can we get the first couple of robots in your facility and train your team.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:07:46] So as far as applications go, especially with some of these smaller- and medium-sized companies, what are some applications you’ve either seen these systems being deployed in or you could see them being deployed in?

Jan Hennecke: [00:07:57] So typically where I see that our value proposition is strongest is in low-cost assembly. Anything that is, you know, very tedious to assemble, but very simple in the process—— you’re just pick-and-placing components and then moving it to the next station. That is something where, you know, one of our gantry, one of our robot solutions, can be very, very cost effective. And then, surprisingly, dispensing. Dispensing has been one of our key applications, because so many applications out there—— where you just have to dispense a little bit… As soon as a human does it, it gets messy, there’re quality problems and so on and so forth. Whereas the robot, they just do it all day. It’s not a problem. So, if you can solve that for them——and we’ve actually proven… We have a whole configurator online. I can show you later. We’ve proven that we can solve these systems for $14,000, the easy ones. So I think that’s something that that we’re really proud of.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:08:58] Yeah. So, what are the industries you’re seeing these in? Obviously dispensing could be a lot of different things. Automotive is one, you know, in terms of adhesive dispensing. But what are some other industries where you see these lower-cost systems adding value?

Jan Hennecke: [00:09:13] Just normal manufacturing. We’ve done anything from aerospace to, you know, pharma or medical devices. But I also think that this year we’re going to focus a lot on education, because I think, looking at the other countries——I’m in contact with the other subsidiaries from Igus and also the German one——and we see there’s a big push on bringing robots into the school system and having students program it. I mean, I’m just thinking about my education… I would have thought this would be awesome, to be able to program on a robot while I was in school. So I think that’s a big passion of us is to understand, how can we bring robots into schools as well? Because if you have a robot that’s $6,000, maybe that’s a little bit more affordable than some of the other options out there.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:03] Yeah, and that’s a really interesting point, because for, I don’t know, the last… Let’s go back about 7 or 8 years, there was this big fear that robots were going to be taking people’s jobs, right? And now the new fear is AI. And that’s a whole other section. Maybe I’ll ask you about that later. But, in terms  of robots taking people jobs, that’s something that’s kind of gone away a little bit. In fact, it’s created more jobs. And to your point, I think in some cases, having a robot on facility where, you might not be an engineer that’s doing the programming, but you might be doing, you know, a little low-level programming or at least operating or troubleshooting the system. With sufficient training, a non-engineering-type person can do that, and it might entice them to work at that facility and not have to… It’s cliche, right, but not have to complete these dull, dirty, dangerous jobs all the time. So now they get to work alongside the robot. Add value in different ways. And like you said, it’s cool.

Jan Hennecke: [00:10:56] It’s just so much fun, I love this. We’re in the middle of our customer test area. We’ll dive into it always. You can see right now, there’s more than 20 robots in here doing all kinds of fun stuff. So, that’s what I believe in as well. The companies we talk to on a daily basis, they are automating because they can’t find labor. It’s something where, if you have robots in your facility, and now [you go] from being the person on the shop floor to being the person who’s in charge of those three robot cells, that’s a huge, huge boost in excitement for the job—— and value as well.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:11:32] How… So, if somebody can go configure a low-cost automation system through this platform and you work with them to get it integrated and you train them… Ease-of-use is something that comes up a lot, and it’s maybe an obvious topic, right? But things need to be easier to use, especially for those non-engineering people that are working on the shop floor and maybe working alongside robots for the first time. What are some different ways that you’ve seen to——I guess, in your integrators and your partners and overall in the larger industrial automation space——make these systems easier to operate and maintain and troubleshoot?

Jan Hennecke: [00:12:05] So I want to preface this a little bit by saying that the whole industry is moving into the direction of ease-of-use. So I’m really optimistic that in a couple of years, most of the robots will be quite straightforward to program. So that’s really exciting. I think the ease-of-use of the robot programming is still different to the ease-of-use of integrating components. It’s easy to make the robot go from A to B, and I would say by now all the robots are pretty straightforward to program if you get a training. But really what it comes down to is all the background knowledge of how to know how to integrate the sensors, how to integrate a seventh axis, something that moves the robot back and forth, cameras, and so on and so forth. So that is something that the industry has to work on is, like, how do I connect to all the other things that I need outside of the robot? And so that’s also something that we’re focusing on a lot here at Igus and RBTX. We have our own controller with the idea that there you can integrate apps and you make it easy to communicate with other components. But you also see many other approaches out there in the industry. Maybe to add one more thing——basically what I believe in is the right training, and then you need to have… basically the more options you have, the better. The more options for different partners. You don’t want to have 5000 different gripper variations, but you want to have multiple different knowledge partners. So you want to have the person that knows really well how to program this robot, and you want to have the person who knows really well how to do the camera thing. And that’s kind of how you bring it together to a platform to bring those experts in to solve individual problems as quick as possible.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:13:50] Well, and that kind of echoes your whole platform here, right? It’s like I said before, you’re not just trying to sell products. You’re saying, “this is an ecosystem of different products. We’re going to tailor it to your specific application and find the best fit,” not just try and say “our product is the best fit.” So, it kind of mirrors what you’re doing here. So in this room, in general, and in the new facility, what’s this going to mean for customers? Not just having this access to this laboratory, but the injection molding facility. What’s that going to mean to existing customers and then, you know, prospective customers?

Jan Hennecke: [00:14:20] So first of all, you’re always invited. Anybody who sees this. This is a big showroom of ours. You can come play with robots. We can give you training. We offer those. So feel free to come by. We have over 20 robots and many, many different end-of-arm tools and so many components that we can use to help you understand what we do here. What we also do here is customer tests. Basically, that is a free proof-of-concept study. I have two with me today. We do multiple of them a week. Basically this is a bushing, one of our own bushings actually, that the customer was, you know, pressing in manually. So they said, “what would it take for us to have a robot press those bushings in?” And we did a quick… We put it on one of these machines that you see behind us, and then basically proofed it out with the video, sent it to them, and they said, “wow, that’s perfect. I didn’t know you could do this for this price.” And then the second example is of a customer test, this here. This comes out of an injection-molding facility right across the street. And the idea here is that we also do a lot of manual tasks at Igus——or did, and our team is working on automating those. So basically this comes out of the machine. Robot is grabbing it and then breaking off those bushings here and separating the sprue from the actual product. So, the injection molding facility itself is really great for, you know, creating some of the more American products. So we have inch product sizes and stuff like that that are, you know… The main market for those is the US. So it’s great to have——.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:15:56] The only market maybe?

Jan Hennecke: [00:15:58] Maybe to have them produced here is a great achievement. And then also just decentralizing manufacturing and production really helps to offset any political climate or any risk in the world. And it’s just great to have a customer here that not only buys robots from us, but also buys some of our other products and, you know… Show them how we make them right over there and have some of our robots in use. Yeah, it’s always good.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:16:25] No, it’s very cool. We’ve got some additional props here. So obviously this is a little miniature robot, but what’s this one here?

Jan Hennecke: [00:16:30] So yeah, what you can see here, this is the ReBeL. It’s a six-axis collaborative robot arm. And this is kind of our flagship product. So,we have done gantry solutions, low-cost gantry solutions forever, but basically this is a cobot arm. We’ve had it for four years. The idea is that this is kind of really embracing the idea of low-cost automation. This arm goes for $6,899——so drastically lower than any of the other competitors out in the market. And we actually achieved that by using the Igus technology, basically, what Igus has been built on. And what we do is, you can see that inside here, I hope you can see this, but basically, all the gears are 3D printed or injection molded. So we do that with the years and years of research that we’ve done into the polymer science and the experience we have with all kinds of applications, fine-tuning those materials, and then printing them. And we actually get a lot of cost efficiencies out of it. Now, it comes with some downsides as well. We’re always transparent about that because we have all the other options. Obviously a little bit less precision and a little bit less payload. But it still does one millimeter of repeatability, and it also has two kilograms of payload, so four-and-a-half pounds, and does 1.5 million cycles. So, I would say for a $7,000 cobot that’s pretty good. And if you need to exchange anything, it’s pretty plug-and-play. Three screws? You take it out and put a new one in and that’s it. So it’s a great robot to get started. It’s a great robot to do very simple, simple things. And, you know, if you’re looking to get your first robot, and we find a good application for this robot, it’s a pretty good deal.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:18:25] What are some applications that you’ve seen as a good starting point for people——like machine tending or kitting or things like this, or what else is out there?

Jan Hennecke: [00:18:34] Yeah. Machine tending of small components. If there’s no high-cycle time, then what we do a lot is we put a camera on the end of it and reposition it. It’s great because the robot costs as much as a camera. So instead of buying three cameras, you just have a robot that goes into multiple positions. And other than that, you know, education people get it for their manufacturing team to learn about robots, to use it, play around with applications with it. So, yeah, many of those.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:19:06] Well, it’s very cool because, if you go to trade shows like Automate or IMTS or any of these other trade shows, you see the convergence of different technologies coming together to solve new problems, right? And I just thought of one that comes to mind is, if you’ve got a cobot with a camera mounted on the end and you’ve got, you know, there’s a light, a light product, maybe a number of lighting products——I don’t know, but I know there’s at least one lighting product out there that’s a multifunctional lighting unit——so you can deploy a camera on the end of a robot for flexible inspections, right? So this can do photometric stereo. It can do square imaging. It can do, you know, straightforward imaging inspection, whatever. But it’s just really cool to see, right? Like kind of similar to how AI and deep learning is becoming more popular, in part because the industrial computing, you know, technologies are advancing——not just GPUs and computers themselves, but VPUs and DPUs and FPGAs, which a lot of people might not consider for these types of applications, but all well indicated for that type of thing. So, [this] kind of segues into what I wanted to ask you about, is just some general trends in the industry. And I brought up earlier and I figured you’re within the space, you’re within the industry, you’re knowledgeable——I just want to get your sense of like… And this is another topic that perhaps was overhyped initially. Deep learning in particular. You know, there was… Within the last ten years, it kind of came out as this product… It was being marketed as this product that’s going to change everything. It hasn’t, but it’s become an extremely valuable tool for the overall automation toolbox. What are your general impressions on AI? Where are you seeing customers find successes? And I’ll stop there.

Jan Hennecke: [00:20:52] No, this is a really cool topic. My general take is, at the moment, the industry has not quite found the perfect application, use case, you know, tool. How can I form AI and really create a lot of value with it? That’s my personal opinion. I’ll tell you why. Basically, we see a couple companies who have used AI. Maybe, for example, text to vision is one application I saw at IMTS. Shout out to Groundlight AI. Basically you could say, give it a prompt and then there’s a camera to inspect something. You can say, “is this glass full?” And then it will look at the glass and say, “yeah, I think that’s full.” Or, like, “I don’t think that’s full.” So, I think that is something that could be great for an operator to do checks, routine checks or something like that, in the long term. I also heard that, for AI, there’s definitely some machine learning for vision. But again, I think this is still too complex for the normal person to use. So I think there still needs to be a lot of development to create the ease-of-use, what we talked about, for these kinds of applications. Because, if you think about it, who uses those? It will… People with high mix and low volume will need vision and AI to adjust for different things. But now those are the  applications who… They don’t have the 250-500 thousand, or million, dollars to spend on an application like that. So you do have a technology that can solve it, but then that usually becomes too expensive again.

Jan Hennecke: [00:22:42] So it prices itself out. Now in the long run, if the cost comes down and somebody can use it themselves, great application. But that’s why I’m saying I’m still skeptical for right now. Lastly, one of the things I was a little bit more convinced of was that I heard that some companies use it to optimize for energy. I know it doesn’t matter too much in the U.S., but also, you know, energy is always just a line item, operating costs. And I’ve heard some numbers that they’re saving around 30% of cost, because they’re optimizing the way that the robot moves, that the cell works through, just like cost efficiency. So, I think that’s cool, but I don’t think that’s the killer application yet. I really believe if we look at machine vision and we can help those high mix, low volume customers that don’t have a lot of money to spend to use basic webcams to do that machine vision without anybody with a PhD degree having to integrate it, then that could be something where I see a lot of value.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:23:44] That’s a really interesting, well thought-out answer and I appreciate it. I appreciate you covering different aspects of AI within automation, too, because there are a lot. And a lot of times with me, one of my first thoughts is to go to vision because a lot of my background is in machine vision. But it’s more than that, right? And it’s to your point: There are——and I want to ask you a counter question about some of the, maybe, common applications where you might be able to use it——but one point that I really agree with is, there are a lot of——I shouldn’t say a lot, there’s several——companies out there now that offer these application-specific, fully integrated systems that can handle hundreds or thousands of SKUs in a warehouse that are picking items for e-commerce and logistics and warehousing. And these leverage AI when things are, you know, askew or handling different parts and high variability and things like that, but to your point, these are in massive, expensive warehouses that are funded by those companies where you buy things online and then they’re shipped to your home.

Jan Hennecke: [00:24:48] Yeah.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:24:49] So there’s a little bit of a roadblock there, I suppose. But what about with applications like OCR where, if a machine vision system is trying to read a barcode and the barcode maybe is not… Maybe the system is not trained on that text or the barcode is a bit askew? It seems like deep learning is becoming a pretty valuable tool in that regard, and that shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Jan Hennecke: [00:25:14] I think again, for vision, there’s lots of potential, and especially for logistics and so on and so forth. I think that the camera systems will greatly benefit from AI. When I was talking about it, I was talking more so about the actual manufacturing space. And I think there, we are still kind of like in the very, very beginning stages. Whereas logistics, you can see these great solutions out there, great companies. I could give shout-outs to many of them. There’re really cool systems where, I think, they are already using it with a good amount of value added by the AI tools.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:25:53] And all the venture capital companies are taking notice. What else are you excited about right now in the larger world of industrial automation? That we haven’t already talked about——and maybe we’ve covered much of it, but…

Jan Hennecke: [00:26:10] So for me, I’ve been working on this for the last couple of years. The question really is, there’s so many small- to medium-sized manufacturers out there. I think I’ve heard a number like 95, 98% of them have less than 200 employees.  Those are really the backbone of the U.S., you know? They are making the stuff. So how can we help them be more efficient? Be more competitive? So I look a little bit away from the technology. I look at the mission that we have, and the mission is that we have to help these companies be competitive in the market, grow, get better product out there, get cheaper product out there, help everyone and, you know, grow the U.S. I think it’s a big part of what we have to do, is we have to help the person who literally just wants to put a bushing in the thing and can’t afford a $100,000 cell for that. So that’s what my mind is, and I’m really excited about it. I think there’s many companies that approach this right now. I think there’s many great options out there. I think what we do is one of them. Then there’s other companies as well. And I think, to anybody who’s trying this, this is a very cool, very cool goal. And I get really hyped up about it. So basically, yeah, that’s what I’m excited about. It’s like, how can we finally help those small shops to get their first robot? How can we get them some pressure from like, “hey, all my workers, they’re like 10 years out from retirement. I don’t know what to do. Anybody I hire that’s new… I don’t really  know how this whole company is going to look in 10 years.” So, how can we help them in the next 10 years? So this is…

Jimmy Carroll: [00:27:57] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was some report that came out——I don’t remember off the top of my head if it was a Deloitte study or something——that some large percentage of welders, skilled welders, are going to be retired within a decade, right? Highly automatable application. And, to your point, that’s how automation can help these companies and these industries stay afloat, especially in times of uncertainty with labor shortages or, like you mentioned earlier, different political climates. Lord knows we have a strange world right now, so you never know. It’s really interesting. So anyway, if people want to learn more, obviously they can go to the website, but you also do virtual visits here, is that right?

Jan Hennecke: [00:28:35] Yeah. And maybe we’ll have some camera footage and stuff of this day. So maybe you can see some of this too. But basically what we’re trying to do here is that we’re trying to show you all the robots and all the applications that we have, so that you can understand how this would fit in your factory. Now, you don’t have to come here. You’re invited, you can come. It’s Rumford, Rhode Island. You can find it on Google Maps. Just come by. Or, you know, you can call us before as well. But, what we do the most is, we do these virtual calls. Basically, we have these little cards, people with the headset on and a camera on the card, and we just drive around and show you the robots. We answer questions, we can brainstorm together. You don’t have to buy anything. But basically we just drive around and we show you all the different systems that we have and try to educate you along the way. So that’s something that we offer here. It’s totally free. You can go on RBTX.com and you find a big button on the right upper side corner. And on there you can just sign up for a 30-minute call and that’s it.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:29:40] I love that, it’s really cool. Jan, thank you so much for having us here today. We’ll put that link and any other information in the description of this podcast, but if anyone has any questions, you can reach out to us directly at Manufacturing-Matters.com. I would be more than happy to pass them along to Jan. And once again, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Jan Hennecke: [00:29:59] Awesome. Thank you Jimmy, thanks for coming by.