St-Gobain employees working with a Robotiq robot

Case Studies

Saint-Gobain

Reduce injuries and increase productivity with the FT-300 Force Torque Sensor

• Resource center • Case Studies • Saint-Gobain

About Saint-Gobain

Saint-Gobain was founded in 1665 as a public society manufacturing luxury mirrors and glass under King Louis XIV’s reign. The corporation kept high-quality standards through the centuries, expanding its business throughout the whole housing industry. Now a global company, it employs more than 185,000 people worldwide. Saint-Gobain’s plant in Sully-sur-Loire, France, focuses on glass production for the armored and aeronautical industries, and the civil market.

Industry

Aerospace

Request a Quote

Watch video

Location

France

Request a Quote

Watch video

Number of Employees

185 000

Request a Quote

Watch video

Products

Finishing - FT-300 Force Torque Sensor

Request a Quote

Watch video

701daf01b9d82dc07055eb4e6f9ba6ee79eb991c609c58a5ceccee00975ee0e3 1

Step 1 - Box dimensions, weight and orientation

Factories don’t buy a robot to replace people, they buy it because they cannot find people. I’ve never seen someone in Romania lose his job to a robot.

Razvan Isac

Sales Manager, RobotsNET

Overcoming Challenges: Our Solutions

The Problem

At the Saint-Gobain plant in Sully-sur-Loire, France, human labor provides high-value work to the finished product. In their shift towards Industry 4.0 to free employees from repetitive tasks, Saint-Gobain wanted to automate a grueling glass polishing process, where a complex movement needed to be programmed for every different, small production series of glass.

The Results

Lean robotics at their best.

Robotiq’s Force Torque Sensor brought benefits on many levels:

Human-robot collaboration: While polishing is in progress, the operator simultaneously washes the glass that was previously polished.
Productivity: Capacity increased by 30%, allowing Saint-Gobain to deliver orders on top of those initially scheduled.

The Robotiq solution

The UR10 and FT-300 combo took part of the work over from the operator, and both started working together. Without the FT-300, this operation would have been quite complex since the programming of a robot movement that must follow a volume in space is a complicated thing to do. With the path recording function of the FT-300, the operator can grab the device and make the movement; the Universal Robots UR10 then records and reproduces the operator's motion.

FT-300-S_3Drender_white-background_fade_square

Products

Force Torque Sensor

By empowering the operator, and allowing him to do the program himself, we avoid calling an integrator every time a product comes back into production.

Discover Robotiq Force Torque Sensor