FANUC's CRX Cobot Boosts Production Flexibility

With a long track record of investing in innovation and automation, Bonvicini Carpenteria acquired its first FANUC industrial robot back in 2001. This hard-working robot is still in service, clocking up more than 60,000 hours of welding operations. However, in recent years, the company has noted a change in customer demands.

“The market today is asking us to be far more flexible, so our choice to help meet this requirement was the FANUC CRX-10𝑖A/L collaborative robot,” states Alessandro Bonvicini, the company’s Chief and Production Officer. “Following our order, it took just one month to arrive as part of an integrated solution provided by Tecnorobot.”

Since its formation in 1993, Tecnorobot has installed more than 2200 robots. Working with FANUC from the beginning, a large number of the robots are active in cutting and welding applications, such as those at Bonvicini Carpenteria.

“At first, the application relied on only one support table, but we soon added a second to weld larger parts in line with customer requirements,” says Bonvicini.

With drag and drop functionality, programming the CRX-10𝑖A/L is easy for any operator, supported further by the robot’s manual guidance capabilities and simple tablet interface.

“When we need to produce larger production batches, we rely on our conventional FANUC welding robots,” adds Bonvicini. “Today, we have one cell that mounts an ARC Mate robot on a track. It consists of four in-line stations, allowing us to produce four different product types.”

In addition, the company has two other twin welding cells featuring ARC Mate 100𝑖D/8L robots that also permit Bonvicini Carpenteria to increase production volumes as required.

The final word goes to Associate-Administrative Officer Chiara Bonvicini as she sets out the need to keep overcoming challenges using the latest automation technology: “Today’s market requires us to offer more and more flexibility and product quality, so our mission is to continue with automation and the installation of FANUC products.”