I Stepped Inside OMRON’s HQ—and Their Machines Blew Me Away

So in case you haven’t read my post about the time I competed in WorldSkills here is the TLDR you need:

• OMRON is a mayor equipment sponsor for the WorldSkills UK Automation competition.

• After the competition, Automation finalists were invited for a 2 day tour were OMRON would give us a further glimpse onto how the Automation industry works.

• We had a lot of fun!

One of the first things we did was revisiting the Worldskills finals tasks. This time without a time limit.

The image on the right shows the panel made with a 3 hour time limit (before) and the same panel made without that time limit (after).

It’s a thing of beauty to see a panel so well wired.

Then there were the lectures. We got so much firsthand knowledge and experience about industry automation equipment.

A major theme I learned was how modern devices used in factories are designed with preventive maintenance and safety from the very beginning.

In short, big-factory machines are very dangerous, those machines need reliable equipment with several redundancies and monitoring mechanisms builtin that allow the factory to shutdown and prevent equipment from injuring staff.

EVERYTHING down to a simple light sensor is able to provide continuous health data that informs the main controller or itself whether it’s functioning properly or it’s gradually deteriorating.

Eventually we got hands-on with some of OMRON’s MAC’s.

These are PLCs on steroids. They are equipped with every communication protocol under the sun, have several redundancies plus safety mechanisms that guarantee it can run until the end of time and it’s powerfull enough to entire land rover factory off a single unit!

We had so much fun that when the evening came we sincerely wanted to stay over and keep working with the MACs because of how exciting it was!

Then we saw the robotics hardware OMRON had!

The video on the left shows shape sorting facility that shows a bunch of robotic arms sorting unordered pieces at blazing speeds.

Then we saw one of OMRON’s factory mobile robots.Her name is Roxanne and she can so so much!

Not only can she roam an entire facility by herself and avoid obstacles but she can also do it while playing the Imperial march as she proceeds with the confidence of a thousand Darth Vaders.

Just check out the clip on the right!

Jokes aside, the reason Roxanne has a speaker is to warn other staff within the facility and therefore be more collaborative as a robot.

After we saw Roxanne in action we also saw a robotic arm collaborating with a heavy duty mobile robot to load up a cargo box and unload it elsewhere autonomously.

This is the mobile robot… moving.

And this is the robotic arm moving boxes around!