Episode 33: An Interview with Hope Dollarhide, FANUC

Attitudes about automation in the finishing industry are changing. Once relegated to high-volume production, automation solutions are seeing increasing adoption for finishing applications, driven by shifting trends in the workforce, rapid advances in robotics and smart technology, as well as the need for repeatability and consistency in quality. In this installment of On the Line, Products Finishing sits down with Hope Dollarhide, project engineer for automotive component and industrial paint with FANUC, to hear her insights into automation trends in the industry. 

Check out an excerpt from the interview (below) or stream the full podcast interview (above):

What are some of the factors that are influencing trends toward automation, particularly in the finishing industry?

I think across the board, we all know that the economy has changed a lot over the past three years since the pandemic. One of the biggest things we’ve seen is that finishers have a lot of labor shortage issues or a lot of high turnover in their paint shop. That’s putting them in a difficult situation, “What do I do if all four of my best painters have COVID and they can’t come into the facility? Or what if we’re shut down?”

We’re also seeing a change in the identity of the workforce. I think that is a huge factor in the demand for automation. With the younger generation, we’re not seeing a huge group of people who want to go into manual spraying or finishing. That identity of the workforce is making people kind of think outside the box. People are looking to automation as an answer for those challenges.

Traditionally, finishing automation has been most often used for high volume production of dedicated parts, with shops processing a varying mix of parts running on mostly manual processes. How do you see this changing or evolving with automation?

I think that is a really important question. If you paint something different every single day or paint 20 different parts every day, how can you take the time to program? Because programming the robot can be time-consuming — it may take a few hours or a few days, depending on the complexity of your part. With all that programming time, high-mix finishers are struggling to introduce automation. And that’s something we’ve been hearing over the past few decades.

So, we are looking at what we call easy-teach solutions — tools that you can use to minimize that programming time.

FANUC offers lead through teach programming or hand-guided programming. That gives you the ability to actually grab the robot and lead through teach — you don’t have to have the teach pendant in your hand, you just kind of guide the applicator along the part. This allows you to kind of eliminate the actual traditional teach pendant kind of programming.

We also have offline tools — 3D simulation that allows you to do all of your programming offline. So, let’s say you know that next week, you’re going to have a whole bunch of different parts that you’ve never painted before. Without causing your line or paint shop to stop [production], you can do the programming on your PC and then upload the programs to the robot.

We also have other tools such as iRVision, which doesn’t eliminate the programming time, but aids customers who have issues with aligning their parts in the same [orientation] every time. iRVision can help align your process or your paint program to where the part is actually located.

We also are working with third-party integrators and other companies that are introducing artificial intelligence (AI) as a potential tool.

With the increasing adoption of robotics and AI, what do the finishing jobs of the future look like?

One thing here at FANUC that we like to say is that the robots are doing the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. When you implement the use of robots in a manufacturing facility, you’re introducing new jobs, because we’re not really talking about total lights-out facilities. We still need someone to operate the robot. We still need someone to program the robot and perform maintenance. And, thanks to smartphones, PCs and smart TVs, people are a lot more comfortable around robots and computers than they were, say, 25 years ago.

What advice do you have for traditional finishing operations that might be considering investments in automation?

I would say to definitely reach out to a system integrator — there’s probably someone you’re already working with [at your equipment supplier]. Especially on the finishing side, those integrators are really knowledgeable… they know the painting process and they know paint shops. And on top of that, just to continue to get outside your comfort zone.