Delivering the Benefits of Intelligent Automation across the UK and Ireland

Sponsor: KUKA Robotics UK & Ireland

For more than 100 years KUKA has been driven by the goal of making manufacturing easier. Being an ‘enabler’ for our customers is what drives us; empowering them to become more flexible, productive and competitive.

In addition to unparalleled technologies, KUKA UK and Ireland offers comprehensive know-how across a wide range of sectors, with one main objective: to dive deep into our customers’ branches of industry and to fully understand their exacting requirements.

Our aim goes far beyond the delivery of a first-class portfolio. We bring our process and application expertise to bear, alongside that from within our established system partner networks, to provide customers with holistic automation solutions necessary to delivering operational optimisation.

These close relationships with our customers and system partners form the basis of our successes. We firmly believe that excellence comes from trust, derived from working as a team – success comes by helping others to succeed, through the delivery of intuitive operating systems.

KUKA’s intelligent automation, aligned with industry 4.0, is bringing to customers digital, networked and flexible production methods: modular concepts that support modern manufacturing business models and give customers a head start in optimising value creation.

Robots, peripheral equipment, controllers and software

KUKA industrial robots span a wide range of versions across various payload capacities and reach, complemented by a spectrum of peripheral equipment: from linear units that can increase the working envelope of an automated cell to end of arm tooling that untethers the true potential of an industrial robot arm.

Combined with KUKA’s portfolio of cutting-edge software and our dynamic, innovative robot controllers, we develop, in consultation with manufacturers, individual processes that align with modern-day production challenges.

Whatever is driving the decision-making process, be it speed, accuracy, repeatability, throughput, mobility or human-robot-collaboration (HRC), there exists a robot model specific to every need. Robots that can operate in sub-zero temperatures to hygienic oil variants across a portfolio with uncompromised and certified hygiene and food safety.

Collaborative robots that are flexible, easy to implement and can share the same workspace as workers, making way for cyber-physical production environments, free from rigid structures and expensive safety fencing. Small, lightweight robots with strength, speed and efficiency at the core of their design that can be optimally adapted to almost any task and working environment.

Whichever model features, the KUKA industrial robot, as the heart of your automated solution, will be custom-tailored to deliver maximum performance in its production setting.

Where tradition meets innovation

KUKA industrial robots’ high path accuracy and speed ensure continuous path motion when coupled with an application-specific end of arm tool delivering quality, simplicity and process reliability on a par with and even exceeding the same quality delivered by operators.

And, as tradition and innovation continue to collide, the misconception that jobs are being lost in favour of robotics is being disproved. In fact, the opposite is happening. Take what has been achieved at Rotherham based temporary fencing manufacturer ZND, where investment in automation has helped to deliver a 400% upturn in throughput, not only safeguarding jobs but necessitating further investment in manpower.

This is certainly not an isolated case either. Investment is happening across the board, even at grassroots level, such as at the AMTCE in Ireland, which addresses the skills and training needs within the Irish manufacturing sector, rich in both manufacturing heritage and production legacies.

SMEs are now recognising that a skilled workforce will evolve in response to technology advancements and is critical to the sustainable success of companies as they navigate through the digital transformation, which is underpinning the Fourth Industrial Revolution.