Originally published in RoboticsTomorrow
Written by: Universal Robots

The Miami startup Creating Revolutions was experiencing double-digit product rejection rates in the assembly of their hospitality service pager technology. The collaborative UR3 robot now handles soldering, drilling, silicone dispensing and light assembly while being controlled and monitored in a cloud-connected system, reducing rejects to near zero while increasing production efficiency almost five-fold.

“The problem is you can’t efficiently repeat a specific process the exact same way over and over again as a human being,” says Einar Rosenberg CEO of Creating Revolutions. “We looked at about 40 different robot companies, and most of them didn’t have a very good way to program them.”

The UR3 was integrated in Creating Revolutions’ assembly line by Hirebotics, a Universal Robots Certified System Integrator that basically works like a staffing agency for cobots, letting startups like Creating Revolutions rent cobots by the hour without any upfront capital expenditures.

“Our premise behind starting Hirebotics is that all manufacturers know how to hire people, so we wanted to make hiring a robot as easy as hiring a person,” says co-founder of Hirebotics, Matt Bush.

“We’re a startup so we couldn’t afford a very expensive robot,” says Rosenberg. “With a traditional robot and a traditional setup of somebody in-house, the expense and the complexity — we are basically changing all of that.”

It only took a few weeks from when Creating Revolutions first got in contact with Hirebotics until the UR3 was ordered, installed and programmed. Matt Bush, co-founder of Hirebotics, explains that in order to run a “robot staffing agency” quick deployment is imperative.

“What has enabled us to do that is the ease of programming the UR robots. The UR interface makes it simple to get it up and running in production much faster than a lot of the other solutions we have worked with in the past,” says Bush.

The robot has become a selling point for Creating Revolutions. “When our customers come here and see the UR3, they realize the quality and precision guaranteed because of the robot. The robot demonstrates to them a strength, which then reinforces the sale for us.”

“We’ve even added jobs to keep up with the increased production the robot generates. The reality was it was going to cost us less money to produce abroad, but with a combination of tax breaks, reduction in shipping costs, and the robot, it allowed us to create jobs here in the U.S.”