CHENNAI: Companies in the FMCG and healthcare sector in India have started to adopt to industry 4.0 through deploying collaborative robots in their manufacturing processes, a company official told The Sunday Standard.
Fraught with safety perils for humans to work alongside IoT machinery in shop floors, expensive machine parts, the lack of availability of skilled engineers to programme IoT bots, industrial robots have been out of reach for many Indian industries over the years.
Currently, it takes about Rs 15 lakh to `22 lakh only to consult and upgrade to partial automation if one opts for collaborative robots, said Pradeep S David, General Manager, South Asia-Universal Robots.
Cobots are industrial robots that are deemed safe to collaborate with workers in a factory. While requiring the least amount of human intervention, the bots can also be programmed to move to different manufacturing processes and assembly lines.
This will help smaller factories with limited infrastructure, a leaner product mix and fewer skilled workers to reduce lead time, move away from obsolete processes without the need for reinvestment in machinery and optimise capacity utilisation, the official added.
Universal Robots, which has its primary production facility in Denmark, gets nearly 50 per cent of its revenue from Europe and 25 per cent each from the US and Asia markets.
The company, which looks to double its total turnover in financial year 2019, said it sees its revenue share increasing from the region in the near future due to aggressive modernisation in Chinese industries and Indian companies starting to adapt to partial automation.
“With the current production facility, we will be able to match the demand for 2018 and 2019. However, we will have to decide on our second plant’s location in the next six months,” said Jurgen Von Hollen, president, Universal Robots.