We cover all aspects of custom robotics solutions development from start to finish. This includes in-house CAD design, machine control software development, machine building, safety, testing and commissioning. Our team of professional engineers cover a broad range of disciplines, enabling us to develop the best solution for your needs.
We can also integrate off-the-shelf robots as well, and recommend this option where suitable as the cost of these systems has significantly reduced in recent times.
Dairy Industry
Numerous robots have been designed and developed for herd testing laboratories in New Zealand and abroad. These robots typically handle milk samples from farms and prepare them for further processing or analysis.
Some of the robotic tasks include barcode scanning, capping, de-capping, stirring, shaking, weighing, heating, pipetting and combining samples, as well as interfacing with other laboratory testing equipment. These robots are very unique because in addition to their functional abilities, they can process large amounts of data. The robots can create files, read and write data to file, transfer files or interact with office computers on a network. This ability to robustly control the flow of data helps guarantee the traceability of the samples. For example, relating a sample back to a particular animal on a particular farm.
Our controllers can interface through EtherCAT directly with digital I/O, analog I/O, encoder modules, serial communication modules, Kollmorgen AKD servo drives and more.
Our manufacturing team have been designing and building machinery and robotic equipment for the meat and dairy industries both locally in New Zealand and abroad for many years. We have a strong team of design engineers combined with skilled workshop staff who together can design and build state-of-the-art machinery or simple custom inventions.
We find that the agricultural laboratories we deal with encounter some tasks that have no off-the-shelf solution, and they have been forced to have people perform repetitive and sometimes dangerous tasks. When they take the time to work with us to explain their problem, we can often deliver a unique and innovative custom machine design. Creating a machine for performing these tasks can result in significant labour savings and improvement to the repeatability of these operations.
Office capabilities:
3D CAD/CAM modelling with a wide range of file types
We provide purpose built custom business software solutions. Whether this involves designing associated machinery, or purely software for applications such as streamlining multiple data entry points, and ensuring certain business rules are applied by staff, we can help.
Automation customers would generally already have a solution in place which they would like to automate, simplify and streamline with or without other existing processes. Our experience lies in designing machines that automate these processes while increasing throughput and minimizing operator requirements.
By providing staff with the right software tools, you can simplify and introduce proper quality control to data entry or modification, and thus prevent staff from causing headaches downstream in business processes.
We have assisted our customers by simplifying and smoothing out their existing processes to become more streamlined, while also providing complete transparency for managers and supervisors who are interested in the finer details, such as who entered certain data or performed a task, when they did it. We can even provide the ability to roll back to a certain point in time for a specific “job”.
We have a great relationship with all of our customers and provide 24 hour remote support. Whatever your business solution requirements, we have the experience and software technology to provide the best outcome for you with the assurance of being able to get support when it is needed.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
A crucial part of introducing a new piece of automation into a system is to monitor Key Performance Indicators that are of interest.
We provide custom KPI reports for our machines which is based around the customers needs for easy to understand reporting. With the machine data ending up in a MySQL database, events can be queried, and results presented graphically or in table form, within a KPI desktop or web application.
These KPI reports are completely custom-built to meet the needs of the customer.
With our KPI reporting you even have LIVE performance reporting for machines, giving you the ability to report on how a machine is doing at a given instant. This also opens up notification options for supervisors or technicians when certain events occur. Existing notification methods include emailing and text messages.
Technology Overview
For business software customers, we use an Ubuntu Server Linux operating system with Tomcat hosting required web services, which in turn access the MySQL databases and local file system.
Machines access the local network, if required, via the web services on our servers.
Business applications come in many forms, ranging from Java Desktop applications, to HTML5 web browser applications built using the latest JQuery and AJAX technology.
Mobile technologies
Our machines provide a service tools web page for technicians so they can easily access configuration options and view the state of hardware without having to be in front of the screen on the machine, or currently be in the machines service menu.
We have also integrated our software to work with mobile broadband (3G USB modems from Sierra), allowing remote access to machine controllers, and also the ability to send text messages and emails. This could be used to inform customers that their results are ready online, or to call a technician when a machine has been placed “out of service” by an operator. This is particularly useful in workplaces where operators can spend 10 minutes looking for a technician, when instead the machine could notify the technician or supervisor by sending a text message when certain events happen.
We are also looking into developing Android applications that integrate with business processes and applications… watch this space!
