Ency and Stäubli Announce Joint Effort to Simplify Offline Robotic Programming

A new partnership between Ency Software and Stäubli Robotics aims to tackling the programming bottleneck that keeps many high-mix, low-volume job shops from implementing industrial robotic arms. According to a report from Robotics & Automation News, the two companies have signed a global agreement to integrate Stäubli’s industrial robots with Ency Robot, a specialized CAD/CAM software platform designed for offline robot programming, simulation, and trajectory generation.

While industrial arms offer excellent reliability and speed, the traditional “teach pendant” method of programming them is often too slow and tedious for short-run jobs. If a shop has to spend hours manually jogging a robot to teach it points for a run of only 50 parts, the robot sits idle, killing the setup-to-run ratio. This single-source report indicates that the partnership hopes to bypass this obstacle by moving the entire path-generation and simulation process directly into CAD/CAM software, allowing operators to program the robot offline while the cell is still running another job.

Targeting the Hidden Cost of Setup

For job shops running a highly varied mix of parts, the true cost of automation isn’t just the sticker price of the robotic arm. It is the persistent downtime associated with changeovers, fixture design, and path troubleshooting. By utilizing offline simulation, the Ency-Stäubli integration reportedly aims to let users identify potential joint collisions and calculate exact trajectories before sending the code to the physical robot.

While the announcement promises to make robot programming “more intuitive, faster, and more accessible,” practical details remain limited. It remains unconfirmed by other industry sources how much this integration will actually reduce setup times for complex applications like structural steel welding, or how much training a typical shop operator will require to run the Ency software effectively.

What still needs to be watched is how this integration handles real-world variations on the shop floor. In a clean simulation, parts fit perfectly, but actual fab work involves material tolerances and fixture variation. Metal fabricators should watch for upcoming real-world case studies to see if this CAD/CAM workflow translates into fewer programming hours per part run, or if operators still find themselves making heavy manual corrections at the physical cell.