Armadillo Robots has enjoyed steady growth for 5 years, designing, manufacturing and selling robot arms for production-line welding and assembly. However, their revenues have flattened, and profit margins are eroding. To grow their top line, an initiative has been launched to produce a new family of robot arms that can perform broader functions and operate in a variety of harsh environments. Armadillo will offer these new products to customers as a Product-as-a-Service (PaaS). Armadillo’s management is naturally concerned about how this initiative will affect the company’s profitability as well as the risks in meeting regulatory and industry requirements.  

Let’s see how the talented team at Armadillo Robots utilizes the Aras platform to meet these challenges. The team will capture and organize new requirements while utilizing systems thinking to understand behavior and structure. In order to keep costs down and promote reusability, a product platform with configurable content will be created and managed. Simulation (using Ansys Minerva) will be performed for design optimizations to minimize the time and cost of physical prototyping. Efficiency gains are expected since the entire team will now be working on one product family in one platform. ​