“Robots are Our Life” - Success Story

At Robotec Solutions AG, customized robotic solutions are developed for a wide range of industries such as medical technology, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, logistics, and metal processing. The company was founded in 1983 and has since been a pioneer of robot-assisted automation in Switzerland.

When you enter the production hall in Seon, the passion for robotics is immediately palpable. The first sentence from CEO Nick Koch says it all: "Robots are our life." All around, specialists are busily working on robot arms and machine controls or programming on the computer, including the latest project for one of Switzerland's largest pharmaceutical companies.

The task: Prepare syringes for self-treatment, so-called autoinjectors, for further assembly and filling. The challenge: Only one and a half seconds are available per injector.

The smallest pneumatic swivel drive

Since the injector parts come in blisters with seven rows, the entire process takes 10.5 seconds. During this time, the parts are to be removed from the blisters, rotated 15 degrees, and then transferred further - all in reduced space. Four robots, conveyor belts, and additional fixtures must fit in a processing cell.

"Compact components are needed for this, which we prefer to mount directly on the robot heads," explains Kevin Bossard, project manager and designer at Robotec Solutions AG. Thus, seven miniature vacuum suction cups are arranged in series on the first robot head, which grip the injector parts and pass them on to pneumatic swivel drives. "The swivel drives were a very special challenge. We scoured the entire market and found the world's smallest drive with our partner SMC," says Bossard. After rotating the parts, they are removed again using vacuum suction cups and transferred to the next processing station.

In addition to the compactness of the components, Robotec also requires components with integrated functions. Therefore, SMC was also used for vacuum generation: This is done on a modular station (island) consisting of vacuum ejectors, bus connection, and monitoring - all in one product, making it easy to procure and integrate into the machine.

Hidden Digitization

What you can't see on the machine is all the digitization - Industry 4.0, CEO Koch points out. "But it is precisely these tasks like wiring, programming logics, and evaluating data that have increased enormously." In the current project, the effort was somewhat increased because the pharmaceutical industry wants everything documented precisely: different access rights to the machine and a history of who changed what and when in the settings. Robotec trains the appropriate specialists themselves and "we also have experts who already have more than 25 years of experience in robot programming," mentions project manager Kevin Bossard proudly.

"We need strong partners"

Nothing works without partners and suppliers, confirms Nick Koch: "We are under enormous time pressure. It's good to be able to rely on strong partners like SMC: Price is not the main criterion for us, we place much more value on good cooperation and reliability." Especially in these times, with global supply bottlenecks, this takes on a new importance for many industrial companies.

Designer Bossard, on the other hand, particularly appreciates SMC's on-site support and the wide product range: pneumatics, vacuum, sensors, electric drives from a single source. He also already has ideas for the latest SMC product: It combines pneumatic valves and vacuum ejectors on a modular island with bus connection. It's quite possible that you will soon discover them on a robot from Robotec Solutions.