Case Study

• 35+ safety-related factory use cases identified across the manufacturing organization
• A polyester-film line where operators grabbed, cut, and transferred moving film by hand
• A threading step difficult enough to fail even for experienced operators
• Production line never designed for robotic handling or robotic access
• Initial automation concept scoped at approximately $2.6M with gripper, arm, mobile base, and receiver

The riskiest work sat inside an existing production flow, and the original program was too broad to prove quickly or affordably.

Defined, scoped, and validated a focused robotics proof of concept on the single highest-risk manual task in the line.

Core idea: Prove the hardest manipulation problem first at reduced scope, then expand toward production once the mechanism works.

• Ran factory observation, stakeholder interviews, and process mapping to locate the true bottleneck
• Selected one operator's highest-risk tasks: grab moving film, cut it, hand off the leading edge
• Removed the mobile base and receiver from Phase 1 to protect the core technical objective
• Cut the proposed proof-of-concept budget from roughly $2.6M to $1.5M — a ~42% reduction
• Partnered with a research institute to build the arm-and-gripper mechanism and validate it against line conditions
• Structured a three-phase path: lab proof of concept, field integration, then productization

Scope discipline converted an open-ended automation ambition into a fundable, provable engineering program.