HELLA turned to Realtime to improve collaboration, motion planning and collision avoidance within its facility. As a close partner of Mitsubishi Electric’s, it was easy for HELLA to apply Realtime’s motion planning solution to its robots.

Realtime’s AI-driven software autonomously choreographs all robot movements, allowing multiple robots to work collision-free and collaboratively within a shared space without interference zones. Robots with Realtime’s technology are empowered to function seamlessly across many deployments, with minimal programming or re-programming.

The company’s user-centric software allows cell specs to change in real-time. For the teams designing, engineering and fine-tuning the smart automation, the process becomes much simpler with the addition of Realtime’s software. “If you’re working with multiple robots, more than one robot in tandem, programming becomes the solution – and deployment becomes so much quicker and easier because, as the engineer, I don’t have to do all the programming,” said Ralph Barbre, Automation Engineer at HELLA. “I just have to know where the robot is going to pick, where it’s going to place and Realtime Robotics takes care of the tracking of the robot, the paths of the robot for me and I don’t have to be concerned about them colliding with each other.”

The integrated Realtime Robotics and Mitsubishi Electric solution provides HELLA with state-of-the-art collaborative robots, on-the-fly robot movement planning, collision avoidance, deployment time savings, improved throughput, reduced cell footprint, reduced cycle times and overall increased flexibility.

As a result, Mitsubishi Electric and Realtime transformed the usual pre-deployment time required for commissioning. The robot movement validation process often takes weeks and can be now done in an offline setting without impacting the production environment. “We’ve been able to really debug the whole cell in an offline manner, talking about implementing it within a day or two,” said Curtis Garrard, Head of Technical Services at HELLA.

HELLA benefits from having the technology at its disposal to be scalable and rework existing production lines as needed. “One of the benefits of the Realtime Robotics platform with Mitsubishi hardware is its ability to drop in nearly any application that’s going on. So whether that’s a new line designed out of the gates or an existing line that has personnel on it, or maybe it had some legacy automation that you wanted to improve, it literally can function in any of those systems you drop in,” said Tim Kalhorn, Channel Account Manager, Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Inc.

As new products are needed HELLA has the ability to reuse prior capital investments to address current customer needs is a massive competitive advantage. On top of that, they also help HELLA provide these products quickly and at a reduced cost than some competitors.