Northwest Industrial Resource Center (NWIRC) recently hosted a robotics workshop by The Proud Company. The star of the show was Sawyer, a high-performance collaborative robot by Rethink Robotics®. “It’s becoming harder and harder to find motivated employees to show up for work and perform mundane tasks every day,” according to Mark Proud, Jr, President of The Proud Company. Proud said, “in order to compete, a collaborative robot needs to be smart, simple, fast, and cheap,” and Sawyer is all that. During the workshop, Proud and his team, including Applications Engineer Jake Hart, demonstrated some of the basic features and uses for Sawyer. The robot’s core applications include machine tending, packaging, loading and unloading, material handling, and kitting. Proud explained that while traditional industrial robots can take up to 200 hours to program and integrate, it takes only about 2 hours to train and get Sawyer up and running. “Sawyer can be trained by a non-expert,” he said.
Kevin Powell, Plastics Plant Manager at Tech Molded Plastics in Meadville , PA, was one of the participants at the workshop and took a turn with some hands-on interaction with Sawyer.
Visit The Proud Company and Rethink Robotics for more information about Sawyer.