So, we're actually excited to show this.
This is our brand new, we call it our TM series collaborative robot.
The collaborative robot is actually designed to work side by side with people.
Hence, the word collaborative, it's almost like, I'd like to say almost like a super power tool or another set of hands.
So, you'll notice that it's very deliberate and how it moves.
We like to kind of make sure that we're pretty cautious on how fast that is going.
So, it will actually move faster but it won't move as fast as some of the ones that you see
that are inside the cage if they will.
And so it's you know, we make a lot of different robots
that get applied to a lot of different types of applications, so, it depends.
If you want something is super fast, you might choose one of the other ones.
If you want something that's easy to move around into using a lot of different tasks
and to help someone that's actually working on some assembly, then this might be your your best bet.
Then, there you go!
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Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Yeah, I'm Keith Carson. Like you said, I work for Omron as the marketing communications manager.
So, I work in marketing and I'm an engineer, electrical engineer by training.
But I work on how we promote and how we do things like the show here itself,
is how do we take all these technologies and put them together in a cool way to show people
and help to find customers and help to educate customers as well.
How does it detect when there's somebody affecting it and run them over?
That's actually a very good question. So each one of the joints,
So, if you look at a robot, it's got all these different joints, four different axes if you call it.
There's a servo motor inside of there
and that motor can actually sense how much force it's exerting,
so it will know to move from point A to point B.
It'll know about how much force it should have to exert.
And if it runs into something else it's able to calculate
"No, hey! I need to stop because that something else might be a person"
So, essentially it's the intelligence in the motors and the joints and the software behind it,
that is able to analyze all of those different joints working together.
to know if it's exerting too much force or too much speed for that matter.
So, this seems like a really big fusion between not only electronics and robotics
but it seems very software heavy. Do you guys have a lot of software people as well?
Oh yeah! There's a lot of calculations that go into motion control.
So, if we look at that there's a whole lot of software around developing the algorithms
and then also develop and they control around the robot.
And developing the software that other people use to program the robot there's a lot of software work.
And then if you also look at those application engineers I mentioned earlier,
the ability to make all these different things work together
that's all different types of software that allows you to be able to make it work together.
So, we have we call it a suite of software or basically an integrated development environment
that is able to do almost all of these things in one software
but it's different than the software you might use to design a robot itself.
But a lot of us actually getting a little bit easier because a lot of the algorithms,
yes if you're going to develop the algorithm that says how they should move to make it do this,
that's different you know, the actual motors
but if you look at like to program this robot, it's simple flowchart programming.
So, or you're able to actually teach it yourself. So one of the things that you can do,
So you'll see, right now I've press the button.
I'm controlling where it's going, so you're able to actually manipulate it.
And it's giving just enough resistance to hold it, and then now it's not moving.
So, you press and release this and you can manipulate all the joints and then you can teach to the point.
So if all the servos were either locked it would be like this where you can't move it
or if they were totally disengaged then it would do nothing.
So, it's actually helping you as you're doing this.
So you can see that the big links are moving also the smaller ones as well.
So, there's even programming and technology that goes into making that work smoothly,
making it easier for you to move it around.
It much like the picking place, there's cameras that are integrated
that locate the parts that are on the conveyor, so it's able to do inspection.
It's also able to identify which parts and then also where they are,
so that the robot can know where to go to pick it up.
This also uses vision guidance to be able to locate and pick things up and do some inspections or read codes.
So, it's not just the robot itself but it's the integration with the vision that makes it easy to set up
and to make it a lot more flexible and the different things that it can do.
and if I'm not mistaken that vision sensor is what detected that my hand was there
[Josh] So, that it dropped the tenon to my hand [Keith] Exactly!
It was waiting to see your hand and once it saw it then it dropped it.
So, you have a lot of different types of engineers, how would somebody get into own one?
How would they even start the communication process?
Yeah, that's a great question. So, there's the normal way as far as, you know,
when we do our hiring and looking to hire people you know, whether they're coming to our website
or we'll do recruiting at job fairs.
But we actually do a lot with schools and universities colleges.
So we have an internship program where we will go and we will recruit.
And try to get some interns that will be put on some really cool special projects over the summer.
And then we also have a new hire engineer program where we will take new hires out of college.
And they get to work in a lot of different areas you know we talked about application engineering,
we talked about sales and marketing and all those different things
they can get a really broad experience and work with a lot of different people in the organization
to figure out where they might fit and what they might want to do.
So how would people find out about these programs?
Best way to do, go to omron247.com and there you can look at the careers section
and you can take a look and see what's interesting.
And then also we're pretty active on LinkedIn as well.
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