If you want to see the latest in highly-specialized plastics injection molding and consumer robotics products, you needn’t travel further than Rumford.

Last Wednesday, state and local officials joined over 100 company employees and industry partners at the recent ribbon cutting celebration for a large expansion of igus, a German company whose North American operation has been based out of East Providence since 1985, and is currently located on Ferris Avenue.

Specializing in motion plastics — such as various types of bearings, bushings, rollers, and cable carriers — the company unveiled its two newest buildings, located on Greenwood Avenue in Rumford, which consists of a 100,000 square-foot injection molding facility, and a 55,000 square-foot low-cost robotics campus.

“This is a stepping stone in the direction of more and more manufacturing we’re going to bring here,” said Felix Brockmeyer, igus President and CEO. “We love being here, and we want to continue to expand here.”

After speaking about the company’s history and growth into the modern day, tours were organized to show off the new spaces.

The injection molding operation is housed within a massive warehouse that had been totally renovated. Currently outfitted with 50 different injection molding machines capable of producing a wide variety of plastic products, the space currently has over half the floor empty and available for future expansion of up to 150 total machines to increase its total output.

The tour gave insight into how the bulk polymer material (a proprietary secret of the company) was stored in large vats, which is then sent via overhead tubing into the appropriate machine depending on the job. Those machines, fully automated, utilize heat and pressure to press the polymer into molds that, once the excess is trimmed, is dispatched to a bin as a finalized plastic part ready for shipping. The excess material is recycled and re-used, a sustainable practice important to a company that was awarded for “Excellence in Green Manufacturing” by Providence Business News in 2023.

Robots for the everyman
Across the parking lot, the low-cost robotics campus, called RBTX, served as an example of the company honoring its past while also ushering in support of a new era for their operations.

When the company first acquired space in East Providence in 1985, they utilized a small 400-square-foot portion within the same building for an administrative office. Today, that footprint has transformed into an open-concept, sleek showroom designed to show off their low-cost, customizable robotics products, which are are intended to provide automated solutions for a variety of small and medium-sized businesses.

“We recognized about seven years ago that (businesses) aren’t asking for robots, but they are asking for robotic solutions,” said Alexander Mühlens, head of RBTX for igus.

The main platform for one of the igus robots that was demonstrated — they have several — is a mobile arm, which can be outfitted with various additional components to allow it to grab things with similar precision as a human hand and move things around in a programmable manner.

The robots are outfitted with igus motion plastic components, some of which can now be made mere steps away in the injection molding facility, instead of higher-cost metals — allowing them to sell the robots for much lower costs (less than $7,000 for one of the gripping robots) and opening up the industry to an entirely different customer base.

There are compromises required for that cost-reduction, of course. These robots aren’t meant to perform surgery, or handle lifting anything above 5 kilograms (around 11 pounds), but they can be a serious time and productivity boon to a small farm that can’t afford to hire someone to sort harvested vegetables, for example, or a small food business who wants to utilize one of their automated gluing machines to assemble product packaging, for less than $10,000.

Furthermore, igus has designed a website and online marketplace that allows even a total robot novice to put together an automated solution for a task they want to accomplish, providing guidance and ensuring compatibility of parts and bundling the necessary programming as part of the purchase.

“If you have any ideas for an application, you contact us and we will give you the information,” Mühlens said. “It’s like the saying goes, ‘If you hate it, automate it.’”

And the sales numbers back up their approach. Mühlens said that igus had sold 15,000 robots last year, a number which has doubled year over year.

According to Brockmeyer, the expansion isn’t done either, as igus is currently at work fixing up another huge warehouse space in Rumford near their current headquarters on Ferris Avenue.