Reducing robot breakdowns
July 1st 2008 Tetley GB, part of the Tata Group, is
enjoying reduced robot downtime at
its tea production facility in
Eaglescliffe, since signing up to an
ABB remote service agreement. It
ensures maintenance and
management, not only of ABB
robots, but also those of other robot
suppliers.
Tetley can identify any potential
problems with its robots before they
escalate using ABB's remote robot
monitoring technology.
Previous problems had occurred
with the production line. "We had
been experiencing a number of
breakdowns during production with
spurious alarms, causing the robots
to periodically stop," says Colin
Trevor the plant's maintenance
manager. "This caused some
concerns with our engineers, who
were not sure what the fault was,
and we spent a lot of time re-setting
the robots, hoping the next
breakdown wouldn't occur."
Eventually, Tetley called an ABB
engineer to the site, who helped to
trace the problem to a fault with the
alarm settings on the robots.
"Although the problem was easily
remedied within just 30 minutes, the
downtime we'd incurred through
trying to trace and rectify the fault
meant that several hours of
production time were lost. It was for
this reason that we were keen to try
out ABB's remote service
agreement," explains Trevor.
The agreement provides access
to ABB's remote monitoring
technology, which uses a service
box and system infrastructure
installed into the robot's control
system. ABB can monitor the wear
and tear and productivity of robotic
cells, which can be shared with the
customer. This helps ensure stops
in production are prevented rather
than ABB simply assisting in
recoveries. More articles from ABB Robotics: | 
