3 Ways a Robotic Solution Decreases Manufacturing Waste

Much of the attention paid to the electronics industry in the last few years has focused on how much waste it generates. While it’s true that robotic solutions and artificial intelligence-powered equipment can actually consume quite a bit of power, they can also slash the amount of garbage that the manufacturing sector generates. Technicians are hard at work discovering new ways to deploy this technology that should help to change the conversation surrounding the way that robotics influences the environment at large. Here are three ways a robotic solution can decrease manufacturing waste.

1. Improved Manufacturing Workflows

According to one study, there was a 30% reduction in unplanned downtime events in factories that adopted AI-guided robotic manufacturing workflows. This improved uptime more than paid for itself, which is why the facility was so willing to put in the equipment. By using this kind of equipment to guide machines making specific goods, factory technicians were able to use far fewer materials and cut far less off of each workpiece. That translated into substantial savings in raw materials, which in turn dramatically decreased the total amount of waste. In fact, this has spun off its own entire field of research.

2. Using Fewer Materials By Design

While guided robots might be interesting, fully automated design workflows are even more so and could potentially lead to far more dramatic savings. Rather than designing parts separately and having each of them manufactured later, a more effective method might be to design entire products all at once using unified software that allows robots to work from the same exact blueprints that human technicians do. Precision machining starts to translate into less raw material ending up on the floor in the form of shavings. Business analysts who are interested in putting in this kind of technology in their own facilities should get in touch with a professional robotics system integrator who can guide them in making the right decisions.

3. By Recycling Existing Materials

One industrial robot has been able to take apart around 200 cellular phones in a single hour. Others have been deployed to sort through municipal solid waste streams and recover copper among other metals. In both cases, the presence of a robot in a manufacturing facility has reduced the amount of material that makes it into landfills by upwards of a fifth to a third. Many of these installations make good economic sense too, since they’re often focused on removing substances that are worth potentially more than many finished products. The biggest problem with recycling has typically been the low economic value of recovered materials. Business managers have remarked that these products have actually appreciated in value, which has led to many calling this a rare example of up-cycling.

Regulatory commissions are actively looking for ways to reduce how much their various jurisdictions pollute. Whether through legislative action or perhaps even subsidies, it’s likely that several of these technologies will get a push from them in the coming years. That makes this interesting to watch not only from an engineering standpoint but also from a social one as well.