From starting out in a Sydney garage in late 2015, RoboHelix now exports globally. RoboHelix’s founder and CEO, Hayel Smair, said he started the company as a response to what he saw as major deficiencies within the flight manufacturing industry.
What was most evident, he said, was that the sector had failed to innovate and keep up to speed with advances in technology.
“The flight manufacturing industry has been stuck in the same process for over 100 years, with traditional machines used to produce flights using a hydraulic press system which forces them into shape using dyes or dye plates. This manufacturing process has been around since the industrial revolution,” Smair said.
RoboHelix is a Sydney-based design and manufacturing company, providing the world’s first and only robotic solutions to the flight manufacturing industry. ‘Flights’, also referred to as ‘screw segments’, are annular steel discs which are formed into a spiral shape.
Flight manufacturing machines form these discs into a spiral shape. ‘Flights’ are used in over 7 sectors on the global market including products such as screw conveyors, augers and mixers. Major sectors include agriculture, construction, mining, food processing, material handling, livestock feed and sustainable dam ecosystems.
RoboHelix robotic machines eliminate trial and error methodology that is used with all of the traditional flight forming machines, eliminates human errors and interaction during the forming process.
This has enormous safety benefits providing a completely safe working environment for the operators, compared to other flight forming machines which require a skilled operator to continually handle the flight during the forming process.
“RoboHelix machines are electromechanically driven and can save up to 300 times in power consumption in comparison to existing hydraulics forming machines,” Smair explained.
“Our technology also eliminates any requirement for protective coatings on materials, and increases production rates. For example, setup time on traditional technologies takes close to an hour on average, whilst the RoboHelix setup is fully automated and is done within a few seconds.
“Because RoboHelix technology safely produces outstanding flights with very high tolerance at an extraordinary speed and without the requirement of an experience operator, we have opened a new market for end users to bring flight manufacturing inhouse, which is larger than the dedicated flight manufacturers market.”
RoboHelix keeps a tight control on machine quality, sending its partners detailed drawings and tolerance 3D CAD models; quality and tolerances check is done first by the manufacturing partner and then RoboHelix carries out its own quality control when receiving any of the parts.
“This guarantees that everything is built to our standards,” Smair said. “All the designs on the machine are modular, so we can easily adapt any customisation into the design without changing any of the base units.”
This also enables production to be carried out in parallel via multiple manufacturing partners – thus reducing production time – before finally being assembled at RoboHelix assembly plant.
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