Developing Leading Robotic Technology

John Schmidt - Technical Manager, 3M

Industrial robots are well established in a variety of large-scale manufacturing operations, but there are still many challenging problems to drive the continued expansion into new applications. 3M’s Advanced Robotics group within the Corporate Research Process Lab specializes in various aspects of robotics and builds bridges with process understanding between academic robotic technology and industrial applications.  Recently, our robotics group collaborated closely with our customer-facing Abrasive Systems Division to build process understanding, tools, and even whole solutions to solve challenging abrasive applications for our customers.  This work builds upon years of experience solving academically interesting and commercially valuable problems for 3M’s internal manufacturing.  In this talk, we will discuss some of 3M’s robotics technology development and the effect 3M’s robotic technology (including process development) has on new automation / abrasive applications and the critical collaboration with external partners (integrators and OEMs) to drive successful solutions.

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