Rösler UK has taken another major step in advancing automated surface finishing with the installation of a new collaborative robot (cobot) at its Customer Experience Centre (CEC) in Knowsley. The investment underlines Rösler’s commitment to demonstrating practical, real-world automation, not as a future concept, but as an accessible solution for today’s mass finishing and shot-blasting challenges.
The cobot, sourced from
Universal Robots, has been integrated as a flexible loading and unloading resource serving a range of mass finishing and blasting technologies within the CEC. Working safely alongside operators, it handles parts with consistent precision, presenting them to the machines in the correct orientation and sequence. This improves process stability, reduces the risk of handling damage, and enables longer periods of uninterrupted operation, benefits that are critical for customers looking to increase overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and reduce labour-intensive tasks.
The Universal Robots cobot is coupled with an advanced vision system from
Cambrian Robotics. Together they act as a powerful, scalable, higher-level handling system, capable of locating, identifying and determining the orientation of a wide range of parts made from multiple materials. In practice, this may mean handling a mixed stream of aluminium and steel components, as well as parts with more complex geometries, all within the same flexible cell. This ensures correct and consistent part picking, placing and sorting without the need for segregated placement in advance.
Because the cobot/vision cell operates as a higher-level, machine-agnostic handling solution, it can be flexibly connected to a wide variety of Rösler systems, effectively removing integration limits and allowing customers to automate across different finishing technologies as their needs evolve. This combination is just one of the many ways that Rösler equipment can be integrated with modern technologies to achieve increased and consistent productivity for customers.
For visitors to the CEC, the cobot cell is a tangible demonstration of what modern finishing automation can look like in their own factories. Rather than talking about Industry 4.0 in abstract terms, Rösler can now show how a cobot can be deployed for machine tending and workpiece manipulation in a compact footprint, with straightforward programming and rapid changeover between different part families.
It also underlines an important principle of Rösler’s approach to automation, that new technologies should slot into existing and future plant layouts with minimal restriction, supporting a phased, low-risk path to higher productivity. Customers see how repetitive manual handling can be replaced by a stable, repeatable and auditable process, without erecting physical barriers or creating complex safety infrastructures.
Dave Williams, head of the Customer Experience Centre (CEC) at Rösler UK, said “Many of our customers know they need to automate, but they’re unsure where to start. By running a cobot every day in the CEC (on real sub-contract work, not just demonstrations) we can show the productivity gains and quality improvements in a very concrete way, and help them visualise what’s possible in their own plants.”
The cobot is already being used on sub-contract finishing projects, acting as an extra “pair of hands” that keeps machines fed while operators focus on higher-value tasks such as process optimisation, inspection, and changeovers. For customers using the CEC as an outsourced finishing resource, this means even greater consistency, shorter turnround times, and the confidence that their parts are being processed in a ‘state of the art’, highly automated environment.
From advanced shot blasting and mass finishing to dedicated AM Solutions post-processing systems for additive manufacturing, the Knowsley CEC is evolving into one of the UK’s most capable and future-ready surface finishing hubs. The new cobot installation is the latest proof that Rösler is not just supplying finishing technology, it is actively shaping how finishing will be done in the years ahead.