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OnRobot (Odense, Denmark; U.S. office Dallas) has launched D:PLOY — an automated platform for building, running, monitoring, and re-deploying collaborative robot (cobot) applications. By automating the integration process of a new robotic application, OnRobot says D:PLOY allows the creation of complete cobot applications in a few simple steps, without the need for programming. At launch, the D:PLOY platform specifically supports the tasks of palletizing, CNC machine tending, packaging, and transferring (pick-and-place) applications, with future announcements planned.

OnRobot says D:PLOY addresses the industry-wide shortage of skilled robotics engineers and integrators, and it will help smaller, less-experienced manufacturers break through existing barriers to automation.

D:PLOY automates many of the manual steps required to build and run an application, including automatically discovering most of the installed hardware and generating the robot motion based on the obstacles and cell boundaries defined in the workspace. The program logic, signals exchange, event handling, and robot movement are automatically created for the entire application based on a few inputs, including workpiece attributes and pick position.

OnRobot says this automation could drop initial deployment time of a palletizing application, for example, from 40 hours to 4 hours. When or if production requirements change, D:PLOY allows users to quickly re-deploy the application for new products or workpieces. In production, the company says real-time monitoring improves productivity and minimizes downtime.