A while back I was looking at a robotic water jet cutting process that needed improvement. The process used two six axis robots and each robot cut half of a part with a high pressure stream of water. We needed to reduce the cycle time and improve the repeatability of the cutting process. By that time in the process about ten engineers had tried to make improvements and each had been able to push the process forward with small incremental improvements. Each of these solutions had two common attributes. The robot was trained to move from point to point, and at each point the robot was told to verify its position. Additionally the robot was told to move at its maximum speed. The solution to reduce the cycle time however was counterintuitive. The first change in the programming involved the elimination of verified positions or points. By doing this the program eliminated a tremendous number of stops in the program. The stops were only milliseconds so they were not initially perceived as relevant. This change also eliminated the jerkiness associated with robots moving at high speed from point to point. The second change reduced the program speed where more precision was required instead of adding points for the robot to follow. The end result were programs that were much faster and more accurate than the original programs. It was common to take a sixty second program and reduce it to thirty seconds!
During my first summer after high school I had a job working on a large construction site. About two thirds the way through the summer I was rewarded with an opportunity to oversee a concrete pour on some large formed walls.
