We are fairly new to robotics and have five installed in the plant. Our manufacturing engineers have been responsible for their programming and maintenance; however, this is no longer sustainable and we need to improve our support for them.

We are preparing to add nine robots for material handling and my concern is that the ME in that department will be overwelmed with maintaining them. Can anybody tell me about their support structure for their robots and are there different levels of expertise in maintaining them? How many robots can an engineer maintain? We currently do welding, plasma cutting, drilling and material handling with the five robots we have.

Any information on the support structure for robots would be helpful. Thank you.