Robotics company FANUC on why it is well placed to help the eVTOL aircraft and UAM markets

As the momen­tum con­tin­ues to gath­er pace in the eVTOL air­craft and Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­kets, more com­pa­nies from out­side this space are look­ing in with real inter­est as they pon­der whether to enter this lucra­tive indus­try and help play a part in its suc­cess. 

One of these com­pa­nies is FANUC, the Japan­ese robot­ics and automa­tion spe­cial­ist. It brought a selec­tion of its auto­mat­ed solu­tions to the Farn­bor­ough Air Show last month, with the dis­tinc­tive yel­low stand show­ing exam­ples of its robots work­ing on drilling and weld­ing appli­ca­tions.

eVTOL Insights spoke to Bob Stru­ijk, FANUC’s Euro­pean Vice Pres­i­dent, to get more infor­ma­tion about the com­pa­ny, the prod­ucts it is work­ing on but also what val­ue it can bring to the eVTOL air­craft and Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­kets — espe­cial­ly when it comes to the air­craft pro­duc­tion and man­u­fac­tur­ing process.

Can you tell us a bit more about FANUC?

Bob Stru­ijk: “We are a Japan­ese com­pa­ny found­ed in the late 1950s by Dr. Seiue­mon Ina­ba, the pio­neer of CNCs (com­put­erised numer­i­cal con­trols), which are like PCs for machine tools. 

“We have a 60 per cent mar­ket share of the world­wide CNC mar­ket; most machine tools have FANUC con­trols and motors.

“Twen­ty years lat­er, in the 70s and 80s, we entered the robot­ics mar­ket, which was dri­ven by the auto­mo­tive indus­try. It had numer­ous man­u­fac­tur­ing appli­ca­tions that were ripe for automa­tion, so it was a good mar­riage. 

“Since then, we have part­nered with some of the biggest brands in the indus­try to bring our tech­nol­o­gy to mar­ket and today, we have the largest range of robots in the world. We man­u­fac­ture over 9,000 units a month, and it is still not enough. The demand for robot­ics over the last 10 years has been increas­ing steadi­ly, but after COVID-19 it has been steep; Chi­na, the US and Europe, all mar­kets are ramp­ing up.

“This is part­ly being dri­ven by a short­age of labour, espe­cial­ly since COVID-19 when some work­ers were forced out of their jobs as a result of strict social dis­tanc­ing mea­sures. Sub­se­quent­ly, many have decid­ed not to return and instead want to do some­thing else with their lives – they don’t want to stand behind machines or work on a pro­duc­tion line all day. 

There is also the fact that robots pro­vide con­sis­ten­cy and pre­ci­sion. A robot can work 24/7 and still com­plete its task per­fect­ly – the qual­i­ty out­put of drilling and riv­et­ing done by our robots is evi­dent. These tasks are still done by hand in some fac­to­ries, but they are cum­ber­some.

“The work­er has to manoeu­vre a heavy gun but still main­tain pre­ci­sion, which may be pos­si­ble for the first cou­ple of hours but after that, the qual­i­ty goes down because the employ­ee becomes tired. A robot nev­er gets tired. Of course, it needs to be set up well; that’s the trick with automa­tion. You need good con­trols, but once it’s set up cor­rect­ly, off it goes!”

Now we’re back to in-per­son events, how has it been at Farn­bor­ough?

BS: “This is the first time we’ve exhib­it­ed at Farn­bor­ough, because we felt we need­ed to go out and real­ly show the mar­ket what these machines can do. Peo­ple talk a lot about robot­ics, but not many have been exposed to it. Plant and fac­to­ry man­agers know about it, but the imme­di­ate day-to-day issues often take pri­or­i­ty over the mid to long-term plan­ning.

“We’ve had many peo­ple come to our stand who work in con­struc­tion, parts and engi­neer­ing and they’ve been very enthu­si­as­tic about what they see and our robots’ capa­bil­i­ties. On dis­play, we have some of our big­ger robots which are in a fixed cage, can work at high speed and car­ry very heavy pay­loads. Of course, these need safe­ty fix­tures in place, because you do not want your work­ers to come in con­tact with one. 

“But also on dis­play are our col­lab­o­ra­tive robots (cobots). They are built with soft­er areas of con­tact and oper­ate at a slow­er pace. When a work­er comes into con­tact with a cobot, the cobot will imme­di­ate­ly stop, which allows for safe co-work­ing. 

“What are humans good at? We have eyes to see, hands to feel and touch, can eas­i­ly com­bine and recog­nise things, and can car­ry out very dif­fi­cult tasks that may not be obvi­ous for a robot. But we’re not so good at rep­e­ti­tion and main­tain­ing a high stan­dard of qual­i­ty for a long time. Equal­ly, we’re not great at lift­ing things and putting them into a machine; and more impor­tant­ly, peo­ple do not want to do that kind of job any­more.

“This is where cobots come in. Anoth­er good thing about them is their ease of pro­gram­ming. It’s like using a smart­phone; you move the robot into posi­tion and tell it to do dif­fer­ent tasks. You can pro­gramme it in 10 min­utes.

“In the past, the belief was that robots are only suit­able for large oper­a­tions. Maybe that was true in the 80s and 90s, but not any­more. Cobots can be eas­i­ly pro­grammed offline and moved around to work on dif­fer­ent machines, and, depend­ing on the appli­ca­tion, they often don’t need to be fenced off, so there are a lot of ben­e­fits to them.”

With all this in mind, what val­ue can FANUC bring to the emerg­ing eVTOL air­craft and Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­kets?

BS: “We can bring a lot. eVTOL air­craft are the next fron­tier. Look at the Tes­la car; it might look like a nor­mal car on the out­side but inside it is total­ly dif­fer­ent. From the man­u­fac­tur­ing per­spec­tive of an elec­tric vehi­cle, you have a bat­tery pack and the pow­er­train is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Plus, there is no gear­box. So, while there are some sim­i­lar­i­ties, there are also lots of new things that we need to bring into this mar­ket.

“We are already sup­port­ing elec­tric vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ers and hope to do the same with eVTOL air­craft in the future, because, like elec­tric cars, they have light­weight mate­ri­als, car­bon fibre, plas­tics and are elec­tri­cal­ly dri­ven. The man­u­fac­tur­ing side of these air­craft is dif­fer­ent to that of an Air­bus A320 or Boe­ing 737, but we are ready for that. 

Are there any chal­lenges that we need to address when it comes to robot­ics and automa­tion?

BS: “There are many chal­lenges. For exam­ple, if you want to com­plete a spe­cif­ic inser­tion of met­al parts, it can be dif­fi­cult for a robot to do. But with soft­ware and floor sen­sors, we can real­ly meet those assem­bly chal­lenges. We also have our own vision sys­tems (2D and 3D); every­thing is inte­grat­ed into our robot con­trol. We pride our­selves on devel­op­ing solu­tions to the customer’s chal­lenges.

“We also use our own man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­form as an R&D test­bed. Our robots are born in our fac­to­ries and are in turn made by oth­er FANUC robots. In our man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties, we have 5,000 robot work­ers and only 600–700 human work­ers. The ratio is almost 8:1, so our employ­ees have been rede­ployed to more val­ue-added tasks. We’re con­stant­ly devel­op­ing our offer­ing to fur­ther auto­mate our own fac­to­ries – and if it’s good enough for us, then it’s good enough for the mar­ket.

“At our UK HQ in Coven­try, we have the facil­i­ty to car­ry out a lot of demos and test­ing. Cus­tomers come to us with issues and say, ‘we can’t do this or that’, and ‘do we need this par­tic­u­lar sys­tem?’. We may not have the answer imme­di­ate­ly, but we’ll often say, ‘let’s inves­ti­gate – bring your mate­ri­als and prod­ucts and let’s do some test­ing.’ Once we can under­stand the customer’s chal­lenges, it is often quite easy to come up with a solu­tion.”

From top L‑R: FANUC’s auto­mat­ed robots on dis­play at Farn­bor­ough, while the white robot is one of the com­pa­ny’s col­lab­o­ra­tive cobots. Bot­tom right is Bob Stru­ijk, FANUC’s Euro­pean Vice Pres­i­dent.