... WITH ROBOTS YOU NEED LESS!
The medical industry needs to meet the highest standards regarding quality and performance. These necessities are accompanied and aggravated by new and continuously changing requirements due to norms and legislation. The tools embedded in the process, therefore, need to be flexible and simple to operate, so that they may be handled by everybody involved. This is where collaborative robots come into play as they are easy to re-deploy between multiple applications without changing the process layout. Thus, they provide the medical industry not only with improved adaptability, which makes it possible to constantly react to changing conditions but also with a key factor for their users: time. Let me share some insights on how robots help products arrive in the right places, as fast as possible at a hospital in Gentofte, Denmark, and at a University in Krakow, Poland.
Let’s start in Denmark where the management of Gentofte University Hospital was searching for an economic way to automate the process of sorting blood samples. The solution had to work within the confined space conditions of a laboratory and permit the lab technicians to intervene at any time. In addition, there was the challenge to maintain valid speed standards without having to expand the staff, while at the same time keeping up with a 20 percent rise in blood samples needed to be analyzed. The only promising solution was provided by the use of collaborating robotic arms.
The crucial factors for the integration of two UR5 robot arms into the laboratory were their safety features: Once the risk analysis had been completed successfully, the robots were able to run completely without protective safety fencing – for which the Gentofte laboratory had no space left, anyway. “We needed an intrinsically safe, easy-to-use solution that was able to grab and sort the samples quickly and to insert them into the respective module for analysis. Universal Robots complied with all these criteria”, says Steen Stender, Chief Physician of the Gentofte University Hospital.