GelSight and Flexxbotics partner for robot-enabled precision inspection
18/10/2024
GelSight, a pioneer in tactile intelligence technology, has announced a new partnership with Flexxbotics, a company delivering digital solutions for robot-driven manufacturing at scale, to provide a joint solution for robot-enabled non-destructive testing (NDT) with autonomous process control. The joint solution incorporates GelSight’s tactile sensing technology into Flexxbotics, for advanced robotic machine tending with highly precise quality inspection and digital thread traceability that reduces time-to-inspect by 40% or more.
Next-generation smart factories in aerospace, defence, medical devices, automotive and other industries where measurement accuracy is critical in tight tolerance processing can now utilise industrial robots and collaborative robots to dramatically speed up inspection processes, increase throughput and improve margins. GelSight’s unique technology uses 3D imaging to map surface finish and defects on any material, anywhere, at the micron level. By robot-enabling GelSight’s tactile sensing devices with Flexxbotics, companies can rapidly perform hundreds of precision measurements during processing on the production line, as opposed to transporting parts to utilise specialised laboratory equipment or relying on outside laboratory services.
Flexxbotics provides interoperable communication between the robots and GelSight devices to coordinate the entire process and connect directly with existing business systems in the plant, including computer-aided design (CAD)/product lifecycle management (PLM), quality management systems (QMSs), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and others for closed-loop quality compliance.
Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) for each part is automatically fed by Flexxbotics directly into the robot and GelSight programs, assuring critical characteristic measurement integrity with inspection results collected for non-conformance tracking and analysis. Optionally, data can transfer to quality repositories and manufacturing execution systems (MES) of record.
Flexxbotics also sends defect alerts via text and email, with prior operations receiving escalations for root cause identification and processing corrections based on autonomous process control instructions from Flexxbotics.
“Together, GelSight and Flexxbotics provide a new level of inspection productivity, scrap reduction and cost savings powered by tactile sensing and production robotics,” said Youssef Benmokhtar, GelSight Chief Executive Officer (CEO). “Now, even the most challenging aspects to dimensionally measure accurately can be consistently inspected in a fraction of the time using robotics.”
“We believe robot-driven manufacturing is the future and our partnership with GelSight combines some of the most advanced automated inspection capabilities on the planet with Flexxbotics production robotic orchestration for next-level factory autonomy,” explained Tyler Bouchard, CEO and Co-Founder of Flexxbotics. “Using GelSight tactile sensing to inspect during production enables robots to achieve micron-scale measurement accuracy, bringing autonomous process control with Flexxbotics to the most complex- geometry parts.”
GelSight is a pioneer in digital, imaging-based tactile intelligence. The proprietary technology that was invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provides extremely detailed and rapid surface characterisation, enabling several surface measurement applications and robotic sensing capabilities.
