I saw a video released by KUKA on YouTube, mainly explaining how KUKA’s robots can improve the productivity of semiconductor manufacturing.
In 2021, due to Covid-19, many factories will have to shut down, it has caused a serious stagnation in production and manufacturing.
Among them, the semiconductor industry has also been seriously affected, The supply falls short of demand with high product prices. The industrial robots can improve the productivity of the semiconductor industry, which is very good news!
Pascal Caprano, project manager of KUKA Deutschland GmbH, he claims: Mobile clean room robots can increase the productivity of semiconductor manufacturing!
Here is what he said in the video:
So the KMR iiwa CR is a mobile robot and the KMR stands for Kuka mobile robot.And the system has two major components：the platform itself which contains the battery and the robot controller, on top we have the robot which is a seven axis robot. CR stands for cleanroom and this means that the robot complies ISO 14644-14.These robots operate at different customer sites all over the word within water fabs.
Over the last years we have a deep-understanding of this industry. So we can see the huge demand for automation with this business, that's why we decide to develop a water handling module that can be added to the KMR iiwa CR. And the water handling module enables our system partners and the end users to easily automate the material workflow inside the water fabs. The silicon is extremely expensive and valuable.That's why the water handling process itself has to be as sensitive as possible.
For the pick and place motion of the transportation boxes, we use the sensors within the cobots.
So the gripper is the patented system of Kuka，it has a very low friction to be used in cleanroom environment.
Our customers asked us for a solution to maintain the production without interruptions for battery charging.
This new inductive charging technology enables the robot charge the battery during the handling motion with the cobot.That means the platform will drive at a station on top of the charging point and the cobot starts handling motion.
During this handing motion, we charge the battery. Means we don't waste any time for battery charging，because we improve it and this enables a 24/7 production without any interruption for battery charging.
So we learned from our customers, there is a large human traffic during a water production. That means our machine has to co-work together with the human operators.So we have implemented some technical safety features such like the laser scanners of the platform as well as the sensors within the cobot arm, to guarantee a safe human-robot coexistence.And this is the advantage of our system.
We have a cleanroom certified robot，we have a sensitive cobot on top and we have a very precise mobile platform.So it is the perfect solution for electronics industry, especially for semiconductor industry to operate within water fabs.
If you are interested, you can refer to the following URL video: