How can you automate a production where even robots’ precision isn’t precise enough? Technological Institute and Manufacturing Technology Centre has tried to find out in cooperation with Evosep – a biotechnological company in Denmark that develops instruments for clinical protein analysis.
If you fall off your bike and hurt yourself you might not know whether your elbow is broken, sprained or just bruised. An x-ray can find out for you, but your body knows what’s wrong instantly. And it is the instruments from Evosep that are used in the research to decode the protein process in the body, so that you in the future can figure out what’s wrong right away.
To do this, Evosep’s instruments need to filter the tests through a so-called “filter-tip”.
Evosep has experienced a huge progress in their sale of instruments, which has put a big pressure on their manual production capacity of filter-tips for the instruments.
- Automation was the only option we had, because we calculated how many elements we had to produce. We could tell that during a year we would have to produce more elements than it was possible to do manually, says Head of Product Management Michael Barrett Andersen from Evosep.
And because the instruments are being used for research, the clients expect them to be of first quality – a standard the manual production wouldn’t be able to live up to.
- Automation and especially automated quality control is extremely important in this business, because what you measure on is so complex.
- The more variables you can take out of the equation, the better. So we hope that our automated pipette tips is the right way to go in this market.
Evosep is one of the 15 Danish companies that has applied for and received a voucher through ROBOTT-NET.
- Robot technology is known for being very precise. During this project, the challenge has been that the tips Evosep produces are so precise and uniform so we had to make the production solution even more precise than the typical industrial robot systems, says robot specialist Xaver Kroischke from Technological Institute and continues:
- This meant that not only did we have to find a robot, but we also had to look at how we could construct the production process itself, so that the product lives up to the high quality demands.
The voucher project with Evosep has not only managed to demonstrate an automation solution – which was the main purpose – but it has lead to so much more.
- We’ve gained more knowledge on how to handle materials and automation. And we have implemented a current solution, says Michael Barrett Andersen from Evosep.