Isochronic AG

The founders of Isochronic AG, a young Swiss industrial company based in Denges – again near EPFL – set out to overcome the limiting factors of current robotics. A robot today can either carefully pick up a part/object, move it or set it down, but it cannot do two of these things simultaneously. Since most of a robot’s movements are along the same trajectories, faster movement along these major axes would also be useful. Finally, the robot arm is usually needed on the surface of a rectangle, but due to the existing mechanics the available working space often does not correspond to these requirements but to a partial area of a sphere or a cylinder.

To overcome these limitations, the founders of Isochronic around CEO Melvin Haas have developed a new system. It no longer moves parts sequentially, but in parallel – in other words several items at the same time instead of just one. At the heart of the isochronic industrial robots is a robust and compact mechanical system; the engineers have shifted the complexity to the intelligent automatic control system. The new system differs from existing ones in two ways: first, the robot no longer has an arm with a single pick head, but a wide main beam on which one to four pairs of rails are mounted. On these rails several pick heads can be active simultaneously.