Foresight Engineering and Robotic Workspace Technologies announce strategic alliance

Citation

(1998), "Foresight Engineering and Robotic Workspace Technologies announce strategic alliance", Industrial Robot, Vol. 25 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.1998.04925bab.005

Foresight Engineering and Robotic Workspace Technologies announce strategic alliance

Foresight Engineering and Robotic Workspace Technologies announce strategic alliance

Foresight Engineering (Shelby Twp., MI) and Robotic Workspace Technologies (RWT) have formed a strategic alliance specifically to support the automotive and automotive supplier industry in their efforts to redeploy existing robots by retrofitting them with the new Universal Robot Controller (URC) from RWT. Foresight ranks among the nation's leading robotics and machine vision system integrators, specializing in developing "intelligent" robots. With the combined resources of Foresight and RWT, robots currently being used in automotive manufacturing plants can now be easily redeployed after their retrofit with new "brains," giving them a new level of intelligence and extending their useful life well into the twenty-first century. This retrofit and redeployment of existing robots will save automotive manufacturers millions of dollars in new capital equipment expenditures.

"Robots are extremely reliable and durable machines," says Walt Weisel, president of RWT, "and they can provide upward of 50,000 production hours or 25 years of service. The fatal shortcoming of aging robots, though, is the fact that the control technology is obsolete, making it difficult, if not impossible, to redeploy these robots in automated environments. The alliance with Foresight will now allow us to retrofit these machines with the state-of-the-art PC-based, open architecture URC," explains Mr Weisel.

"Our customers in the automotive industry have thousands of robots that they would like to redeploy. Now, with the URC, we have a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution. With the URC, the robots will be better than new, and easily redeployable," explains Bob Bartko, vice president of marketing and sales, Foresight Engineering.

The URC provides all the control functionality of the original OEM controller, plus new features only possible on the PC-based, Windows NT, open architecture platform. These new functions are dedicated to improving accuracy, flexibility, productivity, communication, and integration. The URC eliminates the "isles of automation" that have characterized robotic workcells and supports SPC, ISO 9000, inventory control, scheduling, and other automated information gathering and decision making directives in support of manufacturing efficiency.

Foresight Engineering is a member of the Fori Group, which provides a number of standard and speciality automation products to the automotive industry including vision-guided wheel alignment systems, automated headlight alignment systems, tyre and wheel assembly systems, fluid fill systems, robotic dispensing and application systems and automated welding systems. Foresight Engineering is dedicated to developing advanced manufacturing applications, with a particular focus on machine vision and robotics. The Fori Group installs its equipment and systems within automotive manufacturing plants in the USA, Mexico, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

For more information contact Sandra Brooks, Director of Marketing, Robotic Workspace Technologies, 17105 San Carlos Boulevard, Suite A6151, Ft. Myers Beach, FL 33931. Tel: (941) 466 0488; Fax: (941) 466 7270; Email: brooks@rwt.com URL: www.rwt.com