Hirebotics Turns iPhones Into Spatial Teaching Tools for Cobot Painter

Operators move the smartphone around the actual part to be painted to capture key positions and orientations, then company’s Beacon platform generates an optimized painting path

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FABTECH – Hirebotics today launched the latest version of Smart Teach for the company’s Cobot Painter, enabling operators to teach cobots using the spatial-sensing capabilities of an iPhone instead of programming or physically guiding a robot arm. With Smart Teach, operators simply move an iPhone around a workpiece to show the system what to paint and how. Hirebotics' Beacon platform then uses the captured positions and orientations to generate a painting path automatically, without writing robot code or creating a CAD model.

This technology is particularly valuable for manufacturers handling large, awkward or hard-to-reach parts, where teaching paths along the back, sides or interior can be difficult when operators must physically guide a cobot arm to each position. Smart Teach dramatically speeds up this process, making Cobot Painter practical even for high-mix production environments where new parts and applications require frequent teaching.

“This is a major step for robot/human collaboration,” said Matthew Bush, co-founder and CEO, Hirebotics. “We started with the idea that shops shouldn’t have to understand how to program a cobot to take advantage of automation technology. Now we’re challenging whether an operator even needs to touch the cobot to teach it. With our latest Smart Teach technology, operators can now show Beacon the work that needs to be done, and the system handles teaching the cobot how it needs to move to accomplish the job. We’ve evolved from ‘Program the robot’ to ‘Guide the robot’ to ‘Show the robot.’”

The Evolution of Robot Programming: From Hand Guiding to Show
Traditionally, programming an industrial robot has required specialized expertise and often complex CAD or offline programming software. Creating, testing and refining robot paths can take days or weeks, depending on the application and availability of a programmer.

Hirebotics simplified this process by putting robot teaching in the hands of the people who know the work. In 2018, the company pioneered two-button, hand-guided teaching with Smart Puck, allowing operators to position the cobot by hand and capture each point directly at the robot, without writing robot code or building paths in CAD software.

Hirebotics’ latest Smart Teach technology separates the teaching process from physical manipulation of the cobot by allowing operators to move a compact smartphone around the part instead of having to maneuver the entire cobot arm.

The process is as simple as 1) Point the iPhone, 2) Click, 3) Move to the next position, making teaching faster and easier, especially for areas that are difficult to access when manually manipulating the cobot arm. Operators can view the generated path and adjust individual points, spray parameters, and other settings. The resulting program remains editable, giving operators full control over the final application.

“We weren’t satisfied with simply making conventional programming easier,” Bush added. “With our latest Smart Teach technology, operators no longer need to physically guide the cobot arm through the teaching process but can focus on showing Beacon the work they want performed while letting the system handle the path creation needed to accomplish it. The Smart Teach demonstrates our focus on finding the most intuitive way to teach each task, not forcing every operator, part or process through a single programming workflow.”

Smart Teach is an early step in Hirebotics’ continued development of vision and spatial-sensing technology designed to simplify robot training by reducing the amount of programming and robot manipulation required by an operator. Smart Teach will launch first for Cobot Painter, with plans to expand the technology to other Hirebotics cobots (Cobot Welder and Cobot Cutter) in the future. The required iPhone ships with the system.

Experience Smart Teach at FABTECH

FABTECH attendees will be able to experience using Smart Teach themselves to train Cobot Painter to paint a part at the Hirebotics booth, S44049.

Learn more about Smart Teach and how it makes automation even easier by watching this video.

About Hirebotics
Founded in Nashville in 2015, Hirebotics develops collaborative robot solutions designed to make manufacturing automation accessible to the people who actually run the work. Its portfolio includes cobot welding, plasma cutting and painting systems powered by the Beacon platform. Hirebotics’ systems combine robotics, process equipment and software into turnkey solutions that fabricators can deploy and operate without dedicated robotics programmers or engineering teams.