Marcus Scon, global president of ABB Robotics, said: "Across all industries, we are seeing a dramatic increase in digitalisation in manufacturing, driven by changing consumer behaviour and a long-standing global shortage of Labour and skills. This is forcing companies to look for ways to improve operational flexibility, efficiency and sustainability. In today's rapidly changing market, ABB Robotics is driving this shift through our software products, helping businesses accelerate their growth."
ABB Robotics has released a new OptiFact modular software platform designed to simplify data collection, visualization and analysis in automated production facilities, making it easy for users to collect, manage and analyze data from hundreds of plant devices, including ABB robots. By analyzing key performance indicators such as beat time and overall equipment efficiency (OEE), users can better understand the operation of production equipment. OptiFact speeds up diagnosis and decision making, reduces engineering effort, improves line uptime and ensures production meets customer needs.
Marcus Scon, global president of ABB Robotics, said: "Across all industries, we are seeing a dramatic increase in digitalisation in manufacturing, driven by changing consumer behaviour and a long-standing global shortage of Labour and skills. This is forcing companies to look for ways to improve operational flexibility, efficiency and sustainability. In today's rapidly changing market, ABB Robotics is driving this shift through our software products, helping businesses accelerate their growth."
In recent years, digitalization, the need for sustainability in manufacturing, and the pandemic have increased the demand for automation solutions. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the number of robots sold worldwide has tripled in the past decade. Our production is becoming increasingly automated, which is making the environment increasingly complex, driving the need for tools for plant managers to collect and utilize data as a by-product of automation.
Conceive, achieve, improve
OptiFact complements ABB's comprehensive portfolio of leading digital solutions, enabling businesses of all sizes to visualize new digital processes and implement them on the factory floor, improving their operations by simplifying production, thereby increasing productivity and flexibility. With OptiFact, you can identify the root cause of production errors and use ABB's cloud version of RobotStudio to adjust procedures and improve their robotic solutions anytime, anywhere.
RobotStudio desktop, cloud and AR (augmented reality) viewer solutions make it easy for users to conceive and plan new deployments of ABB robots or adapt existing robots to new production tasks. Innovative features such as automatic path planning help the robot formulate the most efficient path to avoid collisions with existing obstacles. RobotStudio delivers a true "WYSIWYG" user experience with up to 99% accuracy between the robot's digital twin and actual deployment, reducing design and commissioning time by 50%.
Application-specific AI-driven software technologies, such as ABB's Item Picker, provide value-added capabilities that facilitate the deployment of robots with higher performance, safety and quality. For example, best-in-class motion control reduces the power of pick-and-place operations by 17% and increases task speed by 13%. VSLAM (3D Visual synchronous positioning and map building) uses artificial intelligence to achieve accurate indoor navigation in a dynamic indoor environment.
