FlexxCORE has been updated for longer unattended production, increased capacity, and improved product quality. | Source: Flexxbotics
Flexxbotics today announced the latest release of FlexxCORE, the patent-pending technology at the center of its Flexxbotics system. The company said the new release delivers more powerful capabilities for machine tending, quality control, and robotic production.
FlexCORE does this by enabling both industrial and collaborative robots to run multiple machines with multiple operations for multiple part SKUs, said Flexxbotics. These new system‘s capabilities enable manufacturers to scale robotic production across the smart factory in a standardized way for greater plant capacity, quality, and Ebitda margins, the company claimed.
“FlexxCORE’s fully RESTful application programming interface (API) now has an expanded data model to enable dynamic definition of the production robotic environment,” explained Tyler Modelski, co-founder and chief technology officer of Flexxbotics. “This means the robots not only understand each machine’s capabilities, operating characteristics, and part processing status; the robots can (also) direct the machines to execute work and know how to correct problems if they occur.”
Flexxbotics said it provides interoperable communication between the robots and other production equipment. The Boston-based company noted that its tools can also connect directly with existing business systems in the plant including the CAD/PLM, QMS, industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and others for closed-loop quality compliance.
FlexxCORE updates extend interoperability
“FlexxCORE is a low-code environment for composing and running Transformers – powerful translation driver connectors,” said Flexxbotics. It includes a secure, high-performance runtime framework with data pipelines, protocols, class structures, method sets, and data models for development.
Transformers enable bi-directional read/write between robots and all types of machinery for many-to-many interoperability, the company explained. The system delivers compatibility with more than 1,000 makes and models of robots, factory equipment, and inspection devices, and it enables 22 times faster connector creation than conventional automation integration methods, according to Flexxbotics.
FlexxCORE now includes features to further extend the coordination among systems, said the company. The system has enhanced awareness capabilities, enabling robots in advanced tending scenarios to interpret each machine’s jobs, processing routines, operational status, and more.
Meanwhile, parallelized data pipelines use asynchronous, parallel pipelines for hyper-performant real-time “robot+multi-machine orchestration,” Flexxbotics said. Greater data granularity capabilities enable an expanded data model and event data capture for robotic operational context, pattern recognition, and machine learning, it added.
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Flexxbotics sets its sights on helping companies scale
“Until now, scaling out advanced robotic machine tending across the smart factory has involved endless custom programming and risk,” said Flexxbotics. “Failed initiatives occur because the robots have limited or no connection to plant equipment and business systems because of interfacing complexity and incompatibilities.”
Previously, robot implementations lacked process integration, were difficult and costly to maintain, and were not ready for artificial intelligence workflows in the “factory of the future,” The company said its latest version of FlexxCORE allows global companies to roll out automation in a standardized way for advanced machine tending. It said smart factory support includes:
Robot+multi-machine orchestration: Robots can control multiple machines simultaneously to achieve longer unattended robotic production for “lights out” manufacturing.
Robotic processing of multiple parts: FlexxCORE can coordinate the robotic production of numerous part types or SKUs within a part family while managing multi-step processes.
Robot multi-job work order staging: Work order changeovers can detect order completion – including FDA-regulated Line Clear – and update part properties for the next order in-feed.
Autonomous process control: The updated system adjusts offset parameters in real time directly in the machine controller’s G-code for process control autonomy, improving quality and digital thread traceability, the company said.
Future-ready agility: Flexxbotics asserted that FlexxCORE enables the flexible adoption of new breakthroughs – such as AI-driven processes – to quickly adapt to new market realities and rapidly changing conditions.
“The manufacturing landscape is transforming faster than ever, that’s why at Flexxbotics we’ve invested heavily in the innovation necessary for production robotic digitalization at scale,” said Tyler Bouchard, co-founder and CEO of Flexxbotics. “We continue to extend our technology leadership with this new FlexxCORE release in order to equip manufacturers with future-ready capabilities for robot-driven manufacturing which deliver measurable results.”
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