Collaborative robots: Meet the co-bot colleague

In the Brooklyn district of New York, Voodoo Manufacturing employs some 30 people in a business that operates around 200 desktop additive manufacturing machines (mainly Makerbot Replicator 2 devices) to produce thermoplastic parts for a variety of customers. Those customers range from marketing operations wanting promotional items to engineering companies wanting support in both prototyping and initial production runs without incurring ‘hard’ tooling costs.

But according to chief technology officer Jonathan Schwartz, in all cases, the company’s key value proposition is that its efficient use of low capital cost equipment enables it to compete with injection moulding on price for production runs between one to 10,000 parts.

Schwartz added that even though the company was only set up three years ago, it soon decided that the business model was too restricted and that its aim must be to become equally competitive in “high-volume” manufacturing, which in effect means for production volumes up to “100,000 parts”.