The grinding industry is facing an unprecedented skilled labor shortage. Many experienced workers in the grinding industry are reaching retirement age and few equally skilled young people are ready to fill the estimated 4.6 million jobs in the industry by 2028.

Investing in automation and user-friendly machines are two ways to help close the skills gap. UNITED GRINDING North America is constantly innovating to tackle customer and market problems with the most elegant technology, machines, and robots. Solutions like the Customer-Oriented Revolution (C.O.R.E.) interface are designed for entry-level use and human-machine collaboration to help shops train new employees faster and to do as much (or more) work even with fewer human staff.

UNITED GRINDING North America’s versaLoad™ is one of these solutions. versaLoad™ is an opportunity for high-mix, low-volume productions to embrace the newest wave of industrialization, integrating human-friendly robots into the workforce to perform rote tasks and to free your human workers to apply their talents to essential tasks.

Introducing versaLoad™

While the world of automation appears to be trending towards collaborative robot dominance, for smaller shops, fully automated robots designed for high-volume shops (like flexLoad™) aren’t the right fit. UNITED GRINDING North America’s customers in high-mix, low-volume production expressed desire for a very flexible, affordable, easy-to-move and even easier-to-program collaborative robot. We heard you and got to work.

versaLoad™ is UNITED GRINDING North America’s new entry-level standard loader, designed to deliver maximum machine tending versatility in a compact footprint. This machine-tending automation solution delivers easy-to-use, highly flexible part loading capabilities specially designed for high-mix, low-volume shops. Using a FANUC CRX-series collaborative robot, versaLoad™ was designed to lower the automation learning curve while delivering a solution that cooperates with lower budgets. While flexLoad™ is designed for maximum efficiency and precision at high speeds and high volumes, versaLoad™ is designed to be another member of your team as you execute on smaller jobs.

Unlike robots from other companies, versaLoad™ is a UNITED GRINDING North American enterprise from inception to design to production to programming to installation. And because of this, versaLoad™ easily assimilates into your production as another part of the UNITED GRINDING ecosystem. versaLoad™, like the name suggests, is highly versatile, designed to be easy to move between your automation-equipped UNITED GRINDING machines with a loader interface. Pick versaLoad™ up with just a pallet jack, move it to the proper machine, and connect it to your UNITED GRINDING machine with an ethernet cable, and versaLoad™ is ready to work.

versaLoad™:

• works out of all three part trays – one at a time – placing finished parts in the same tray from which they were picked
• has a touchscreen “tablet-style” robot control
• features a single gripper part exchange time of 20 to 30 seconds, with an option for a dual gripper to cut the time in half.
• can handle a wide range of part lengths and diameters
• can handle workpieces of varying weight
• is highly portable

How is versaLoad™ Helping Smaller Shops?

UNITED GRINDING North America designed versaLoad™ to aid every level of an organization.

Grinding machinists can spend their time more effectively. By delegating loading and unloading to the robot, human workers avoid repeated strain and monotonous tasks and can instead float between machines to do tasks requiring human expertise.

Managers can allocate their human resources better. Adding versaLoad™ to your UNITED GRINDING machine helps produce the same or more output even with fewer human staff members. And because versaLoad™ is easy to move and is compatible with any UNITED GRINDING machine with a loader interface, managers have flexibility with operator placement, moving versaLoad™ to where it’s most needed on each shift.

Businesses can do more with less. Delegating loading and unloading to collaborative robots avoids operator variation, which can yield greater consistency on output and streamlines load/unload times. And when new employees come aboard, they can spend time learning from both their human and robotic colleagues.

Conclusion

versaLoad™ was designed to help shops with high-mix, low-volume production runs boost productivity by simplifying grinding process automation. In addition, the simple robot-teaching interface and lower price-point make automation more accessible to manufacturers looking to install automation into their machine lineup.

Get in touch today to discuss the challenges you’re currently facing and to see if versaLoad™ is the right fit for you, your staff, and your UNITED GRINDING machine.