Delft Robotics

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Company profile:

Delft Robotics started in 2014 as a spin-off of the European Union sponsored project ‘Factory in a Day’. The project Factory-in-a-day aims at improving the competitiveness of European manufacturing SMEs by removing the primary obstacle for robot automation: installation time and installation cost. Due to the very positive feedback and large interest from the commercial sector prof. dr. Martijn Wisse and Arie van den Ende kickstarted Delft Robotics.

As a company we aim to make more automation solutions accessible for small and medium sized production companies. With the use of industrial robotic arms and 3D vision solutions highly flexible systems can be created within a minimal development time. This allows for automation of repetitive and laborious production tasks which, previously, could only be performed by human employees.

Currently Delft Robotics houses six engineers, boasting expertise in robotic control, mechanical design, computer vision, artificial intelligence, system integration and human machine interaction. This team of engineers analyse new challenges, advise customers in next steps of automation, and develop and install turnkey automation systems. Our close relation to the Delft University of Technology allows us to cooperate in new developments and to use the new academic developments in the systems we deliver to our clients. Delft Robotics makes use of, and contributes to, the open source community.

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What problem does Delft Robotics solve?

Automation conventionally requires complete control over individual parts and components. The machines involved simply repeat a standardized cycle and are little equipped for variances in the products as well as in the production process. These systems contain lots of mechanics, are inflexible in operation and expensive in development. For these reasons automation has mainly been applied in areas where a fast amounts of the same product are manufactured for a longer period of time.

This approach to automation is inaccessible for smaller companies. Especially in Western Europe, smaller production companies retain their position by providing on demand manufacturing and being able to change their product-line quickly with a changing market. This requires a new form of automation. One that allows for distributed investments over time in tools that are both flexible in a more chaotic production environment and flexible as to changing production tasks in the future.

By incorporating the high flexibility of robotic arms with the versatile sensing capabilities of 3D-vision cameras, Delft Robotics can provide solutions to automation problems that have, until now, been impossible or too expensive to develop. The use of of-the-shelf components in the meantime provides a larger reusability when changes in production changes or removes production tasks. Additionally the reduction in mechanical components greatly reduces the size and thus the required floor space of the system.

By actively pursuing efficiency in development we continue the decrease the costs of automation. Because of this already several of our clients see possibilities and are considering reshoring of production. These same highly efficient development methods of Delft Robotics have also already attracted the attention of larger production cooperation’s such as Philips and Boeing.