Industry-wide disruption has never been felt on such magnitude as in 2020. With the Covid-19 pandemic, the Manufacturing industry struggled to meet supply chain demands with limited manpower and resources.
Fortunately, this can be alleviated with smart factory solutions. Based on a Deloitte global survey with more than 850 manufacturing executives, 85% see an increased need for smart manufacturing technologies. While 87% believe it is necessary to stay competitive.
As part of the Industry 4.0 revolution, Pudu Robotics is designed to meet the evolving needs of OEMs. In this article, you will learn the following key benefits of how PuduBot optimised Shenzhen Kaifa Precision Technology’s (Kaifa) manufacturing processes to be better, faster, and more productive.
1. Minimal Downtime, Maintenance & Disruption
Most manufacturers have reservations about adopting new technology because of the substantial downtime and opportunity cost that accompany the installation and troubleshooting.
Thankfully, PuduBot comes with none of those disadvantages - requiring only two hours of installation to be implemented immediately. Moreover, PuduBots can be used continuously for 24 hours before a quick four-hour recharge.
PuduBot is easily accessible through the touchpad or mobile app. Owing to its user-friendly and intuitive nature, staff of all ages can easily operate the bot. Therefore, manufacturers need not disrupt the daily operations to send their staff for additional training.
2. High Volume Delivery & Production Efficiency
Efficiency is key for every business. Manufacturers produce enormous amounts of parts daily to keep up with the market demands. Having a bottleneck would limit their production output.
After reviewing, we discovered the inspection process to be Kaifa’s bottleneck. Previously, with a 10,000 square metres factory space, the staff would travel long distances to deliver the parts for inspection. This resulted in time and labour wasted on mundane and repetitive tasks.
With PuduBot, each bot could make multiple deliveries per day at a faster pace and carry more loads than an individual could. To date, PuduBots have accomplished a record of 6000 deliveries of more than 80,000 trays in one month.
This removes the need for personal delivery and allows the inspection process to be more efficient. Henceforth, increasing the factory’s production output and revenue generated.
3. Seamless Integration With Your Manufacturing Process
3.1 Improved Operational Efficiency With Dual-Path Autonomous Driving
Multiple robots are utilised to support the sheer volume of tasks at the workshop. Often, these bots cross paths with each other. In most cases, robots had to stop to allow the other robot to move ahead, leading to a slowdown in delivery.
Pudu’s Dual-Path Autonomous Driving function allows PuduBots to function cognitively like humans. They can automatically detect their counterparts and move to create space for dual-way traffic. Hence, mitigating the time wasted waiting and enhancing the ergonomic experience for parts delivery.
Three Key Benefits
Support dual-path autonomous driving for single roads with a minimum width of 1.6m.
Automatically generates a dual path based on the mapping of Kaifa’s premise without the aid of physical markers.
Switch driving modes accordingly to accommodate dual-way driving.
3.2 Prevents Accidents & Collision Within The Factory Space
Despite having safety measures in place, accidents can happen. Your machinery can be damaged and staff can suffer from injuries. Apart from the revenue lost, manufacturers can chalk up big-ticket expenditures including machinery repairs, parts replacement, medical/hospitalisation fees, and higher insurance premiums.
With the 3D Obstacle Avoidance Technology, Pudubots can navigate through people and objects without colliding or obstructing others. Equipped with Lidar, RGBD depth cameras, and stereo sensors, PuduBot can detect obstacles 10 meters from its path and stop within a 0.5 seconds time frame.
The quick reaction time would prevent potential accidents from happening and incurring the additional costs.
3.3 Maintain Production Levels With Lesser Manpower
It is now possible to keep to the production schedule despite a leaner workforce. At Kaifa, one PuduBot completes 1000 tasks per day - the workload equivalent of two staff.
This frees up manpower to focus on more qualitative work while the PuduBots handle the menial tasks. Manufacturers can expect to see a stark improvement in production capacity without hiring additional manpower.
4. Cloud Ecosystem For Integrated Operations
Chosen for its cutting-edge A.I. and IoT technology, Kaifa witnessed how Pudu’s dedicated ecosystem augmented the operational efficiency in complex indoor environments with high-volume turnover activity (e.g. restaurants, hospitals).
“We greatly benefited from using PuduBots. Not only have we experienced an exponential increase in productivity, Pudu’s A.I & IoT technology also enhanced our operations with the integrated cloud system (Pudu Cloud) and decentralized communication network (Pudu Scheduler).” - Jingjun Wang, Senior Manager (Kaifa)
4.1 All-Round A.I. Services with Pudu Cloud
To cater to the evolving needs of the manufacturing industry, we developed Pudu Cloud - intelligent, cloud-based service support for Pudu robots.
With Pudu Cloud, we can now support the following advanced A.I. functions:
Business Management Platform
Automated Operation
Maintenance Platform
Scenario Data Collection Platform
Cloud Intelligent Service Platform
4.2 Save Millions on Infrastructure with Pudu Scheduler
Traditionally, multi-robot communication requires an advanced network system that is run by a high-powered, central computing node. This would have cost millions to upkeep.
Pudu Scheduler is a decentralized, flexible ad hoc network communication scheme and algorithm architecture. Via this infrastructure, each robot can directly communicate with any robot in the same network and make calculated decisions without compromising on operational efficiency.
Through Pudu Scheduler, Kaifa achieved multi-robot collaboration and communication with up to 100 PuduBots within their production space. By using Pudu’s solutions, manufacturers can simply tap on our ecosystem to access the advanced communication capabilities without spending excessively.
5. Artificial Intelligence Robotics & Capabilities
5.1 Real-time Fault Detection, Reporting & Self-Update
Faulty machinery can mean a great deal of trouble for manufacturers. It could delay or halt the entire production line. Often, a significant amount of time is taken to identify and fix the fault; resulting in lost revenue.
With Pudu’s A.I. capabilities, the fault is detected in real-time. Our system sends a report to the centralized cloud system for further action. Pudu Cloud then locates the fault module and resolves 90% of the issues remotely via A.I. machine learning and program scripting.
In addition, Pudu Cloud runs all the reported fault data at Kaifa through a built-in automatic fault diagnostic tool. This tool constantly updates the overall infrastructure by creating new scripts to resolve the bugs - preventing any recurrence.
With real-time fault detection and automatic updates, manufacturers could save on dedicating extra manpower and resources to manage PuduBots. Since the chances of PuduBot malfunctioning are extremely low, it’s unlikely to disrupt the production line either.
Feedback From Kaifa Overall, Kaifa had a positive experience with PuduBot. After surveying with their team on-site, we learnt that the user experience could use some improvements. Some of our key findings include,
Provide a shortcut button to support instantaneous delivery
Automatic self-charging instead of manual charging
More voice features
Louder and clever speaker volume to hear and understand PuduBot
While we work on developing a better user experience, Kaifa intends to implement the use of PuduBots to adjacent processes and production lines in the coming years. Are you a manufacturer struggling to solve your bottleneck issue? Looking for innovative ways to optimise production instead of just cutting costs? We offer a diverse range of robotic solutions that will cater to your factory’s needs. Contact us for a personalised consultation with our robotic specialists today.
About PuduBot
Pudu Robotics (PuduBot) is the first autonomous delivery robot. Its effective industrial design won the German Red Dot Award and spearheaded a new trend for indoor delivery robot designs.
PuduBot offers a suite of smart factory solutions to meet the optimisation and operational needs of the industry.
Since its release, PuduBot has been widely adopted in over 50 countries and 500 different settings; including factories, hospitals, hotels, office spaces, etc.
About Kaifa
Kaifa is the world’s leading electronics manufacturing service provider, with more than 30 years of experience in developing hard disk substrates and semiconductor parts.
Kaifa supplies up to 25% of the world’s demand for electronics; producing an average of 150 million units of components per annum.
They have since expanded to more than 10 countries (including the USA, UK, Singapore, Netherlands) with a 25,000 strong team to support their production and R&D needs.