Mobile robot handles monotonous production floor deliveries

Founded in 1978 and employing 130 people, Danish fireplace and wood stove manufacturer Scan A/S produces 14,000 stoves annually from its 107,600-square-foot facility. After deploying a mobile robot, the company has automated many kilometers of production floor deliveries, allowing workers to remain productive and producing a return on investment within one year.

Previously, an employee had to push a trolley from place to place throughout the facility, a monotonous chore for highly paid manual laborers.

“It is costly when internal transport costs man-hours,” says René Hannibaldsen, production manager at Scan A/S. “It challenges a company like ours because we are based in a country with high labor costs. Automation of internal transport is therefore an obvious way for us to improve throughput and boost our competitiveness.”

Capable of carrying up to 660 pounds of goods at a time with a towing hitch, the new mobile robot (MiR) makes 10 to 12 daily trips with deliveries of bolts, screws and other parts for assembling the stoves. It can find its own way around between five and six addresses in the factory, where it delivers materials from receiving to production areas.

“We save about half of a full-time position by automating this process,” Hannibaldsen says. “But we expect to achieve further gains from the investment in the long term, as we have several other tasks in mind that we expect the robot can solve for us.”

Hannibaldsen said it was important for the company to introduce this type of mobile robot into its production processes and to accustom employees to having robots moving around them and other rolling equipment.

“Naturally, we were a little skeptical at first, because it has to move about among staff and forklifts with goods, but there have never been any collisions,” Hannibaldsen says. “It moves smoothly around all obstacles. And all the employees think that it’s fun, so the robot has generally been well received.”