“Let’s not treat the humans like a robot. Let’s treat the robot like a robot.” 

Welding and fabrication can be tedious and unfulfilling when you’re creating the same part over and over. This is just one factor that’s making welders harder to find around the globe. While some manufacturers have invested in traditional robotic welding cells to handle repetitive tasks, they’re often prohibitively expensive and hard to use. In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, Matthew Bush, COO and Co-Founder of Hirebotics, joined TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and Amanda Del Buono to talk about how the cobot integrator is helping solve the labor shortage with accessible, easy-to-use cobot welding cells.  

They discuss the impact easy-to-use cobots are having on the fabrication workforce, how these solutions are improving product quality and safety, and much more. 

Winn Hardin: [00:00:07] Welcome to Manufacturing Matters, the podcast where we look at the technologies and the trends that are reshaping the manufacturing industry around the world. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by my co-host Amanda Del Buono, who is a good friend of ours over at Tech B2B Marketing. Are you doing good Amanda?

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:00:21] Yeah, great.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:00:22] Beautiful. And we’re lucky enough to get a little bit of time with Matthew Bush from Hirebotics. How are you doing Matt?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:00:27] Good. How are you guys doing today?

 

Winn Hardin: [00:00:28] We’re doing solid. For those who don’t know, we are right below 20,000 of our best friends who are walking around the Automate show floor right now, making connections and learning about technology. And, Matt, would you kick us off during this episode, tell us a little bit about Hirebotics.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:00:43] Yeah. So Hirebotics, we were founded about nine years ago.  We’re a collaborative robot integrator that got into robotic welding about five years ago. You know, really going out there trying to change the industry and help solve the labor shortage that the welding industry is facing today.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:00:59] You know, it’s interesting. We did a paper not too long ago, and I think there was a projected 27% gap in terms of demand for welders versus the available folks going out to like 2027 or something.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:01:12] Yeah. If you look at the numbers, it changes all the time, but I think AWS right now is projecting a 400,000 welder shortage in the U.S. And what’s interesting is it’s a global issue. It’s not just an American issue. It’s not a Canadian issue. I was in Australia just a few weeks ago. They’re facing the exact same problem down there. Canada is facing the same problem. Europe’s seeing the same issue. The Middle East is seeing the same issue. You know, people are just not being attracted to the manufacturing industry like they used to.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:01:37] Welding is a tough job too.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:01:38] It is.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:01:39] A lot of gear in a hot environment.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:01:41] Being under that hood with that smoke and the light. It’s not a fun place to be necessarily.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:01:46] And the fumes can also be dangerous too, for sure.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:01:49] Yeah. And another thing that’s really impacting a lot of countries, will be impacting the U.S. at some point, is the change in the laws around the fume and getting it extracted and away from the operators. It was interesting. I think it was Australia. They’re now starting to require them to wear full-face respirators. Especially stainless, with the hexavalent chromium. That’s adding even more gear into a hot environment.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:02:14] True. Very, very true. So one of your main focuses is automating these welding work cells using robotics.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:02:21] Yeah.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:02:22] How’s the uptake been? How is the welding industry, or the metal manufacturing, fabricating industry, how are they responding?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:02:28] It’s been great. We launched the first product about five years ago at FABTECH 19. When we launched then, there wasn’t a lot of cobalt welding. We were the only ones that were doing it. Us and one other company. You go to FABTECH this year, there’ll probably be 40 or 50 of us doing it. So there’s been a huge uptake of it. What you’re finding is that it’s really giving the smaller manufacturers the first chance at really automating their process. You know, when you only make 10, 20, 30 of a part, it’s really hard to justify buying a traditional weld cell. They’re very expensive. They’re very complex to set up. They’re intimidating to a lot of people. You see a lot of them go into shops, and they bought one and they never could figure out how to make it work. So then they’re very hesitant to do any more automation because . . .

 

Winn Hardin: [00:03:12] They got burned.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:03:12] They got burned.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:03:14] Literally. Sorry. That was a bad pun.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:03:17] Yeah. But we met with a company in Australia. They did that. They bought a quarter of $1 million system that they couldn’t use. So now they’re looking at one of our solutions. So it’s been good. But, you know, what’s interesting is the number of large companies that are now getting into cobot welding, Fortune 500–sized companies, companies that have potentially hundreds of automated weld cells. Because what you find is they still have a ton of manual welding because they make a lot of spare parts, low-volume pieces, R&D work, where they still need it welded but they can’t justify having a traditional welding cell do it. So we are seeing a pretty big uptake in large organizations where instead of being a onesie, twosie kind of company, we’ve got companies with 10, 20, 30 systems at them. Not what we would have thought of five years ago.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:04:10] Gotcha.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:04:10] Interesting. It kind of goes into that whole conversation we have in automation a lot about reskilling labor. Moving people from manual jobs into robot operations jobs, which I think kind of goes into what you guys do, right? You’re getting welders to become cobot operators. Kind of wondering: How do you see that? How has the uptake been on that? How are welders taking on to operating a cobot?

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:04:35] So what’s been interesting is when you first go into a company, they’re all scared, right? They’re going to lose their jobs, because that’s what you hear in the press is, “Oh, people are going to lose their jobs to robots.” That’s not true. Almost all of our customers grow their workforce. It’s shocking when you actually look at the statistics.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:04:49] It’s consistent across everyone who adopts automation actually.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:04:51] It seems like working a cobot would be a lot better of a job. I would have a much better time going home to my kids after working with the cobot.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:05:00] Yeah. And so what’s interesting is, once they get in and realize they’re not going to lose their job and they embrace it, you quickly find they are finding other things to put on the cobots or finding other applications for cobots: machine tending, press brake tending, things like that. You know, welders don’t like making the same repetitive part all day long anyways. It’s mundane. It’s the old adage “Let’s not treat the humans like a robot. Let’s treat the robot like a robot.” And so what we find is they’re really starting to embrace it. They are seeing it as an opportunity to upskill, to learn a new skill set, to extend their career. We had a customer where they had an older welder, highly skilled guy, but due to age he just couldn’t weld anymore. You know, his shoulders were messed up and just being under hood all the time. And if you’ve ever welded, it’s not the most comfortable position to put your body in ergonomically. He got into the cobot and he’s like, I can extend my career. Instead of looking to retire that year, he worked for a couple more years. And what he did was he no longer welded, but he got to work with the younger welders and teach them the things that he knew, that he had learned over the last 30 or 40 years of being in the industry, and be able to pass that knowledge down to the younger generation, because what you find is, because so many companies are struggling to hire enough people, the older generation isn’t getting to necessarily mentor the young guys coming in or the young gals coming in. They’re still stuck on the line doing the job because somebody’s got to do the job.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:06:23] That’s a really cool complement, though, of an older gentleman getting interested in the robot, liking to work with it, and then bringing in young people who are going to be all about working with the robot, and melding them together.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:06:37] And so one of the things that we’ve done that’s very different than any of our competition is that our robots are all taught on a cellphone. And so we’re giving them a teaching device that they’re very comfortable with. They’re not taking up a teach pendant and being like, “Oh, God, it’s robot terminology.” We’ve taken all of the robot terminology out of the automation. So when we talk about it, we’re automation people, we don’t talk about tool center points; we talk about which gooseneck do you have installed on the robot. Choose it from the app. Yeah, it’s a dropdown menu. Do you have a 22 degree, a 45 degree, a long, a short? Choose it. The robot configures itself for that gooseneck. So we’re not having to teach them robot terminologies. They don’t learn joint move and linear move and process move. They learn linear weld, radial weld, tack weld, stitch weld: terminology that’s comfortable to them. It’s their language that they speak every day. So that suddenly drops the barrier. They’re just not intimidated by it. We’re able to teach them in a matter of minutes, even on the show floor. You know, if somebody comes up to our booth, we don’t demo the robot for them. We hand them the tablet and let them teach it, right there on the floor. And they’ve learned probably 80% of what they need to know to run the system in production in 15 minutes at the show.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:07:53] Now, is it my understanding that because there’s such a dearth of qualified welders out there, the robots are usually doing the repetitive, the small, the maybe relatively easy welds compared to where you’re taking your skilled people and you’re putting them on the more challenging welds and fabrication, correct?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:08:07] Exactly. We’ve got a customer in Wisconsin. You know, when we got there five years ago, they run a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day shift, but they only welded on Shift A four days a week, because they couldn’t hire enough welders or supervisors. But what they’ve done now is they’ve grown their weld department to be one of the largest departments in the company because they’ve been able to bring in work that encourages the welders or excites the welders. It’s large. It’s structural stuff, while the robots are there making the trinkets.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:08:37] Exactly.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:08:37] And they’ve been able to go out and bid more work than they could bid before. The fabricators are actually fabricating, not doing mundane welds. They’re getting to do what they want to do. And it really is encouraging them to stay in the industry, because there is a lot of people leaving the industry, especially younger welders that we talk to aren’t interested in wearing a hood for 20 years or 30 years.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:08:58] Especially if you’re doing dull, repetitive tasks. You know, if you’re doing creative metalworking, shaping. These guys are artisans. That’s where they come from. You know, and so be able to have that kind of job fulfillment and offload the stuff, the trinkets, like you said, the small elements.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:09:14] The other thing that we see, especially with the younger guys, is they’re really getting into the science of welding, and they’re being allowed to do that because they’re offloading that mundane work to the cobot. And now they can go spend time learning the science behind welding and how changing the settings affects the weld and how they can get better productivity, better weld penetration, better-looking welds, because they’re not worried about just getting the weld down. Now they’re being able to really dial the systems in. And it’s getting them really excited about being in the industry long-term.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:09:45] We recently read one of your case studies about reducing rework pretty dramatically for one of your customers, but it sounds like with welders getting more interested in the science behind welding, you’re also seeing, just in general, better-quality welding overall?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:10:00] Yeah, without a doubt. You’re seeing better quality. You’re seeing higher productivity. So we’re seeing customers that are seeing 3 and 4x improvements in productivity, taking what may have taken the human, call it four hours, to make, and the robot’s doing it in an hour. And a lot of that’s through they’re able to travel faster. They’re not stopping, lifting their hood, taking a sip of coffee, doing a smoke break, talking to their neighbor, whatever it is. The robots, even if they’re cobots, they move relatively slow compared to a traditional cell. They just continue to move. But yeah, the quality is going up. We’ve got a sample up in our booth this week of a customer down in Australia that makes this beautiful part. It’s a very thin stainless part. You would never believe it was MIG welded because you can’t MIG weld it by hand the way this is welded. They were having to TIG weld it, and they saw a 10x improvement in productivity going from TIG to MIG.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:10:51] Well, if you can handle stainless steel with the robot, then you can handle just about anything.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:10:54] We’ve got customers doing aluminum, stainless, copper, nickel, you name it. You know, we’ve got guys welding it, galvanize the stainless.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:11:02] And they’re all keeping all their employees that they had, just teaching them.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:11:07] Some of them are growing. You know, most of our customers are actually growing their workforce because they’re able to go out and get more business. They’re able to bid on more business. They’re able to get their backlogs down. You know, one of our case studies, DeAngelo Marine down in Fort Lauderdale, they cut their backlog from months to weeks in a matter of a couple of weeks by putting the robot in.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:11:28] That’s going to make a lot of happy customers right there.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:11:31] So they’re not here this week because they’re out trying to find more customers on the West Coast. So they’re out touring shipyards on the West Coast trying to get more business because they can now make more product. And so they’re able to grow their company, hire more people, make their employees’ lives better.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:11:50] That makes people want stay too, work this job. I could go home and do T-ball with my kid and still feel good.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:11:57] And not have to put in, say, an additional 10, 15 hours of OT, which of course destroys margins on work, jobs, job orders, and everything. So you might get a cobot for 25, maybe a full welding work cell might be maybe twice that, depending on all the elements that might go into it. Could be more. But what kind of ROI are we seeing? What’s the payoff period for someone who’s adopting this type of solution?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:12:23] Yeah, so it depends. You know, we’ve seen payoffs. We’ve been reported as few as six weeks. We had a customer in California that got a job. It needed to be welded. He didn’t have a welder. He bought a system. That job paid for the system. You know, DeAngelo Marine, I think they said it was a couple of months to pay it off. And we have some customers, depending on where they’re at, it may stretch out to nine months to a year. But the payoff on most of these is pretty good. The systems start around $95,000, and when you look at what the fully burdened labor rate of a welder is today, it’s not that far off of what an annual cost is to have a welder in a manufacturing shop, so most customers are seeing pretty rapid payback.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:12:59] Plus a welder that can work practically around the clock three shifts a day, if the demand is there.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:13:05] What’s interesting is how few customers actually ask us about ROI.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:13:08] No kidding.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:13:09] You know they’ve got a problem, right? They have a labor problem that they’re trying to solve, and they need a solution to it. They need them to make parts. They’re not necessarily looking for, “Oh, I’m going to make a return on my investment this year.” It’s, “I’m going to solve my problem, which is I can’t grow my business. I can’t satisfy the customers that I currently have.”

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:13:27] You can’t sell your product . . .

 

Matthew Bush: [00:13:30] . . . if you just have a massive backlog, and you’re not going to get more work.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:13:33] I wanted to ask you, we had talked a little bit about the heat and being in the hood and stuff. How does that, if you’re operating one of the cobots, how close are you to it? How engaged are you with it? How much does that change every day?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:13:49] Yeah, depending on how long the part runs. We have some customers where they set up really long parts. The parts may run for 45 minutes before they’re done. Those operators are running multiple machines. They’re away from the smoke. They’re away from the fumes or outside the weld cell. You know, prepping parts for the next robot or prepping parts that have just been welded. Maybe they’re doing some grinding or finishing work. Then you have some customers where maybe they’re welding a part that takes 30 seconds to weld out. And so the operator still is pretty close. But the nice thing is they’re able to get behind the weld curtains. They’re not necessarily standing right there with their face over the fumes, their head right in the arc light. So they are able to get away from the cell. It just depends on the operation.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:14:29] Are they combining that with any kind of automated part feeder so that basically you can even kind of take the operator, again, letting them focus or her focus just on complex solutions, complex welds?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:14:38] So most of our customers are not, because they’re high-mix, low-volume. And by the time you take and set up tooling and end effectors and get the robot program to pick a part. Well, I only need to make 15 of it, or five, or three. You know, we have customers that tell us, we ask this question a lot, it’s like, “What’s your minimum batch size that you can truly make?” And they’ll be like, “Well, if I need to make it once a month, it’s a contract-type job, three to five. If I’m going to make it just once, maybe 10.” You know, because by the time you spend a few minutes programming, you need to be able to recoup that time and not, “Well, it took me just as long to program and weld as it did to just weld the parts.” So most of our customers, because we really are targeting, we tell people, it’s not really a robot system you’re buying. It’s a tool for your welder, no different than you buy them a nice angle grinder for prepping welds and grinding welds. You know, this is just a tool to make their day more productive and get them out, home, back to T-ball sooner, and still being able to meet all the demands of the company that they work for.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:15:41] So are we just at the beginning of the adoption curve in terms of automated welding cells?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:15:49] Oh I think we’re very early, because we still, even at the show today, we hear from people: “I didn’t know this existed.”

 

Winn Hardin: [00:15:56] Absolutely.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:15:57] You know, and this isn’t a fabrication show. You have people showing up here that aren’t expecting to see a robotic welding system that’s approachable at a cost point that’s accessible, at a level of skill that’s accessible, that they can say, you know, I could see myself putting this in and within a couple of days being able to make production parts, a couple hours. So I think we’re still very, very early. You know, if you think about the sheer number of manufacturing companies just in the U.S., it’s hundreds of thousands of small shops. I think globally, I haven’t looked at the statistics in a while, but I think welding is still the number one use of robots in the world. That’s where they started. Here we are 40 or 50 years later and it’s still the number one use. So I think we’re still very early on the adoption curve, especially with cobots.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:16:41] At early years that was mainly automotive manufacturing, like big, large production lines.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:16:46] Still it’s primarily automotive, especially when you look at traditional, it’s automotive or tier level.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:16:51] Right, right.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:16:52] Whether it’s OEMs or tier 1, tier 2.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:16:53] Going lower into the tier levels, which is just opening up more small-medium enterprises, as opposed to just the big OEMs, the Fords, the GMs.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:17:00] Yeah, a couple of our larger customers are actually automotive in that they sell to the automotive industry. But it’s not car parts, it’s dunnage. You know, they’re making all the dunnage racks and stuff, the stampers and stuff needed for shipping body panels around. And you think about that, that’s traditionally not things you’re going to put on a traditional robot because you might make 100 of them or 200 of them. And you’re never going to make that dunnage again. How do you ever justify putting that on a traditional cell with tooling and everything else? And yet they’ve got dozens of them making dunnage.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:17:33] So to what do you attribute this wider availability of automated welding systems? Is it the advent of the cobot, which brings the price point down and it’s much easier to program? You were showing us the cellphone program capability. Or is it software? Is it the emergence of the cobot or is it a little bit of everything?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:17:52] I think it’s a combination of everything. When we started Hirebotics, it was back in 2014, we were actually putting cobots into our manufacturing plant that we ran. And it was very early days of UR in the U.S. And what we saw was this interesting convergence of an easy-to-use robot – cobot – cloud, for us, and then just the whole risk aversity of manufacturing.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:18:16] Yeah.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:18:17] You know, manufacturers are very risk averse. Capital is very precious, hard to get. I’ve been in operations for a long time. You go to corporate, you beg for the capital, and you hope to God it works, because you’re putting your political clout on the line, you know? Yes, this is going to work. Trust me. We know it’s a lot of money. Trust me, it’ll work. I think all of those things, at least for us, kind of came together at a head about 10 years ago. And it was like you suddenly had a bunch of software tools that were accessible. You had a bunch of robots that were suddenly accessible. And so what you see is a bunch of people building software for robots to make the robots even more accessible and more solutions-focused versus it’s always a custom thing that’s getting put together.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:18:57] With a long development time.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:18:58] Yeah. So even us, when we first started, we did all custom turnkey integration. That’s what we did. We hired it out versus selling it. We had a different model trying to get rid of that risk aversity. But it was really the combination of, I can throw a cobot in the backseat of my car and drive it to a customer, put it in their conference room, plug it in, and demo it. You’re not doing that with a traditional robot. I’m a big guy, and I’m not picking up a traditional robot. And early days of our company, we literally drove around with one in the backseat of our car to customers and put it in their conference room and demoed it to them. That’s how we got them comfortable with it. We literally put it in there.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:19:34] That’s still a big backseat. I don’t care how you slice it.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:19:38] Yeah, I was thinking it’s the best sell ever. When you see something, there’s nothing that’ll sell you more than seeing it.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:19:44] It didn’t work for us, but we had a sales guy who worked for one of the distributors that actually drove around with the UR in his backseat, waving.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:19:51] Oh, that’s so fun.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:19:53] A UR5 in the backseat of his car. The first time I ever saw one. He was like, “Come out to my car,” and I’m like, “What are we doing?” It’s in the backseat of his car, running. It held up a little sign that actually had his phone number and would put it up to the windows.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:20:06] Well, if you’re driving around the Detroit area, that’s a really good thing to do.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:20:09] Yeah, he sold robots that way. It was hilarious. But back to the question. Yeah, the cobots have really enabled what we’re seeing at the smaller manufacturers. The moms, the pops, everything, to be able to adopt automation for the first time ever. I remember the first robot I ever bought, 15, almost 20 years ago now. I got thrown a little tabletop SCARA on my desk and said, here, you figure it out. And you know, we did. But we manned a highly automated factory. We would never look at putting a six-axis in back then. The cost, the complexity. And we made very high volume. Millions and millions of parts a year, in the automotive industry. And we still weren’t a robotic opportunity. It just wasn’t a fit for us.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:20:56] You’ve kind of mentioned the idea of ease of use a few times, which is kind of buzzy word right now. But I think with your app that you mentioned too, that kind of plays into there. Just curious how you see the importance of ease of use for people. Having the cobot obviously has made a big difference, but the app I think is a really unique feature that you guys offer.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:21:19] So we look at ease of use as a holistic approach of everything in the system should be easy to use. It should be easy to order. It should be easy to support, easy to install, easy to program or teach. So we’ve done that through a lot of different ways. One, we standardize our product very heavily. We always joke that we’re the Henry Ford of robotics and that we have two part numbers. You want a big one or a little one. We don’t customize at all.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:21:43] Right.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:21:43] You get what you get. If you want to customize it, yay. Good for you. You’re going to get a table. It’s coming this way.  And we’ve done that to make it simple. Our lead times are like a couple of days. You know, call up, order today, and ship tomorrow. So it’s easy to order, easy to support. Support’s built directly into the app that the user is using. When they have a question, all they do is open a side panel and go to support and ask the question. You know, our average response time in 23, according to the metrics, was like a minute and a half, two minutes. Globally. We have customers all over the world. Ease of use. We’re giving them a cellphone or a tablet.  How many people don’t have a cellphone today?

 

Winn Hardin: [00:22:24] A lot, actually.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:22:26] I presume that they can just, I could download it on my iPad. It’s on the app store.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:22:30] It’s in the Android Store. It’s in the Apple Store. It’s web-based. You can run it on a Microsoft Surface tablet as a web app. You can get to it from your laptop. We’re no longer handing them a teach pendant. We’re not teaching them robot jargon. We’ve taken the language and put it into a language that the welder understands or the fabricator understands for plasma cutting. So it’s like very tailored language because we see that as a barrier. You know, when the first product launched, it still had a lot of robot-y jargon in it. And we saw where that really tripped up the fabricators. And so when we launched the second version of the product a couple years ago, we took all that jargon out. We really simplified it down to where it’s really, really simplistic in its approach. We don’t do the advanced welding features a lot of times because when we talk to customers, they’re like, “Hey, we don’t use them. We paid for them, but we never use them. It added cycle time. It caused scrap. We didn’t understand how to use it.” And so we’re really trying to look at that holistic approach of ease of use. It has to be everything working together.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:23:38] Right. Cradle to grave.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:23:41] Yeah. It’s cradle to grave. So take something as simple as version control. Our system automatically backs up every version and you can restore back to any version in time.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:23:49] Is that the cloud component you were referencing earlier?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:23:51] Yeah. So you can literally store documentation directly on the part in the app. So now where’s my documentation? It’s right there. How do I set up the table for this job? Go to the part, open it up, pick up the picture, and look at it. It’s a picture.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:24:04] So it sounds like this is probably making onboarding new employees and especially young, green employees probably even easier.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:24:12] Oh yeah. It’s literally hand them the app, tell them to go to support and watch the 15 YouTube videos right there in the app while they’re playing with it. So it’s very accessible. Like setting all the weld parameters is all done in app. You’re not on the welder doing anything. It’s all in the app on a point by point. So it’s very contextual. When you’re setting the arc start time, it’s on the start point of a weld. When you’re setting the end point, it’s on the end point of a weld. So we’re trying to take the whole system and make the whole thing easy to use.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:24:47] Right. And it won’t take your head off, which is kind of a nice thing with the cobot, right?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:24:52] Yeah. Yeah.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:24:53] So, Matt, what haven’t we touched on? What’s hot that we haven’t talked about? Where’s home for you?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:25:00] Nashville.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:25:01] Oh. Lucky dog.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:25:02] I thinks it’s Nashville. I don’t know. I’m never home. My wife lives in Nashville, how’s that? You know, we’ve got a lot of new stuff coming out this year. We just launched the new Miller Auto DeltaWeld. That’s our latest robot welding package. It just came out.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:25:19] Fantastic.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:25:21] Our new Cobot Cutter came out late last year. Really starting to make some inroads with that around guys that have tough-to-cut parts. It’s either low-volume stuff that you can’t justify getting another piece of automated equipment for or it’s a shape that you can’t put on a traditional table.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:25:39] I was just going to ask what the difference was between a traditional cutting table with discrete moving and gantry-type operations versus a bot.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:25:46] So, for instance, container homes are becoming a big thing. They can use shipping containers and turning them into homes, offices. It’s really hard to cut one of those on a standard X-Y gantry table.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:25:55] That it would be.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:25:56] Yeah, yeah. Floors, windows, AC outlets.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:25:59] Not exactly a flat surface in most cases.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:26:02] No, and they’re kind of big. So they’re able to just wheel up a cobot to the side of it and with about 30 seconds of teaching teach where the door needs to be and say “cut.” Now I can wheel in the next container. Cut the same door. Cut the same door. Cut the same door. Versus putting a human over there, trying to cut the door. And then you’re going back there with a grinder and filling, trying to grind it open and make it square and fill it in and everything else.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:26:24] We kind of talked about the parts that exist. What is it like teaching the cobot these things?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:26:30] There’s a couple of buttons on the end of arm. One of them allows you to move the arm around. The other one, you click on it, and that’s adding points into the program. So it’s literally as simple as you go on the app, you set up a part name, you grab some weld settings or cut settings, and then you’re in teach mode. The robot starts flashing some lights and it knows you’re teaching, and you simply start guiding it through its motions and saying, I want a very glorified connect-the-dots. We’re going to put a bunch of points in space, and the robot’s going to know how to connect those points through both motion and weld parameters or cut parameters to build a three-dimensional object out of those points that you’ve just given it. And so it’s simple. Literally, we were teaching a 4-year-old a couple of weeks ago at a show how to use the system. We didn’t have to show him anything in the app. We kind of had to help him with the robot, because let’s be honest, he was a little fella, but he was still able to move it around. We showed him where to put the start point and where to put the end point. And he was able to click the buttons and press “play” on the operator.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:27:34] Now there’s a promotional video. That’s what that is.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:27:36] It’s on LinkedIn.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:27:38] You know, in a few years those kids are going to be getting into the industry and it’s going to be amazing to see what they do with robotics, growing up with them from day one.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:27:47] That’s right: 7 or 8. Go get a job.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:27:49] We’ve got a push on right now, at the high school level, of getting cobots into the hands of the high school students. Fortunately we’re finally beginning to have a revitalization or a renaissance of tech trade, of trade schools. You know, we’re finally seeing that we’re not pushing every kid that’s got to go to college. A huge proponent of it. Everybody needs jobs.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:28:13] Absolutely. You can make good money. You can make good money even if you’re not a traditional welder as well as a work cell operator.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:28:19] Do you guys do a lot of work in education and schools?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:28:23] It’s been an emphasis of ours for a long time. We’re really starting to try and push into that from a business standpoint. We just brought on recently a distributor that’s in that space, in the education, both college and high school level. And they’re really going on and starting to push into the schools the cobot technology. And they do it across the board for everything. But, you know, they’re really starting to push welding because they’re getting a lot of interest. The weld schools see that the manufacturers want the guys coming out of weld school, the gals coming out of weld school, to have at least some exposure to robotics. They don’t necessarily care if they know how to fully program one, but they want them to at least have that exposure that they’re comfortable around them, they can use them. And what they love about our system is it truly is that easy to use. You know, the instructors aren’t spending days and weeks trying to teach them how to program a traditional robot. You know, we’ve got a handful of high schools in the U.S., we’ve got a handful of trade schools that have the systems. And what we’re hearing are really good things from them. And so we’ve really taken that as another area to emphasize and to begin to build that next level of workforce that’s going to be entering the market in the next few years and try and reenergize younger people wanting to enter manufacturing and realizing it’s not what your grandparents did. It’s not standing on the assembly line, shoulder to shoulder with 100 other people doing the one little task that you’re going to do all day.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:29:46] Put the screw in. Put the screw in.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:29:48] It is a much more cognitive job today than it ever has been.

 

Amanda Del Buono: [00:29:52] And much less demanding on your body.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:29:56] And better paying, because the company can make more money. More productivity means better jobs and better pay for all, where everyone is involved. So that’s beautiful. Matthew, I can’t thank you enough for taking some time out of your day to come visit with us. Thank you so much.

 

Matthew Bush: [00:30:07] Yeah. Thank you.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:30:08] Guys, get busy because you only got 400,000 more gaps to fill, right? More welders to find, more robotic welders to find. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Manufacturing Matters. If you’ve got any questions for Matthew Bush, Hirebotics, please just send them below. We’ll make sure we get them to Matt. Why don’t you swing by his website. Hirebotics.com?

 

Matthew Bush: [00:30:25] That’s correct.

 

Winn Hardin: [00:30:25] Beautiful. And if you want to check out our old episodes, go to manufacturing-matters.com. You can see our previous episodes. If you want to be on a future show, just ting us and you can find all of our episodes on whatever your favorite podcast platform is. Until next time, thanks for joining us.