What Challenges did the costumer face?
Amphenol Pheonix was in need of a solution to optimize both their rough and fine polishing processes of stainless-steel parts as they were offered to produce the Microsoft Surface Duo hinge.
This gave them the following challenges:
- Increasing demand and high quality requirements
- Manual processing not suitable to create sharp finish
- Hard to obtain high throughput and minimize material waste
- Using specialized machinery required a high investment and the machines were only useable during the lifetime of the produced product
- Hard to find automated solutions that can create the same finish as a skilled polisher
How did Nordbo Robotics address these challenges?
To solve these challenges Nordbo Robotics re-used the basis of the advanced polishing software and added a new “Teach Method” called Point to Point (P2P), enabling Amphenol Pheonix to create robot paths by teaching waypoint with the teach pendant of the robot and generate a new program within minutes. This provided the needed flexibility and enabled them to use the same systems on other projects, given them a great advantage on competitiveness.
The robot precision and repeatability together with Nordbo Robotics polishing software and precise force control ensured consistent polishing quality and gave Amphenol the following results:
- Increased productivity and throughput with 300% compared to manual processing
- Increased quality ratio with an average of 50%
- Return Of Investment (ROI) in 1,5 year
- Decreasing scrapped material caused by faulty processing
- Improve workplace ergonomics and safety within post-processing department

Fully automated polishing cell at Amphenol

Automatic robot polishing using P2P teach method
The Nordbo software was implemented using the following hardware set-up:
- 12x Nachi MZ07L robots
- 12x Nordbo Controller
- 12x NRS-6 Force Torque sensors
- 12x robot polishing cells with automated in- & outfeed
About Amphenol
Amphenol was founded in 2001 and is one of the largest manufacturers of interconnect products in the world with several Forbes500 customers such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft.