Epson Robots | Dunwoody College of Technology

Dunwoody is a technical college in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Dunwoody was founded in 1914 by our founder, William Hood Dunwoody. He was a silent partner in a company that became known as General Mills. Our department includes a bachelor's degree program in automation and controls engineering. In addition to that, we offer degree programs at the associate degree level. The automated systems and robotics program at Dunwoody has been in existence for over 30 years. Nothing will substitute for hands-o

n physical training. So one of our goals is to make the lab resemble the industry. We want the students to be trained on the hardware, on the software, on the components that are going to interface to the robots in the real world. So prior to the relationship with Epson, we didn't have a SCARA robot on campus. We got feedback from several of our advisory committee members that that was a hole in our curriculum. So when we met with Jason and AAE and got to see what the T3 SCARA could do, that was

a huge benefit and a huge call to our program. I'm a Dunwoody grad. And I ended up at Air Automation. And once I kind of found out how easy the Epson robots are to use, I reached out to EJ and Dunwoody and invited them in to do a tour. A lot of the industries around here are medical device manufacturers. They use a lot of Epson SCARAs. They want Epson training. They want our students to graduate and know how to deal specifically in Epson. Dealing with the actual equipment that they're going to

be using out in the real world speaks, I think, for itself when you get out in the industry. What I'm really impressed with with the Epson T3 SCARA is the fact that they are extremely fast, they are extremely accurate. Then really what hit home to us was the price point. In our lab, we actually have 12 of the T3 SCARA robots. We don't run a lab of bigger than 12 students. So what that means is we have one robot per student, which really gives them as much hands on time as possible. The fact that

we can afford one student per robot, it's critical. They're not waiting for the USB cable to be passed over to them to check their code. They can fix anything and look at anything that's critical to them. I really like how easy it is. You can just unlock the robot, move it where you want to move it. And if you need a little bit more precision, then you can go over to the software. The ease of programming and the accessibility of the software and the simulation in the software were some of the k

ey points for us. When we went through a COVID scare, the simulation software was a huge benefit. We actually took our students with the simulation software. They were able to program the T3 robots from home. It's a super intuitive software. It was pretty easy for me to teach Joey on the first day how to get it going, get started. What's helpful with the Epson libraries and the help files in there, you can copy and paste from some prebuilt programs and build on it. For those students who have ha

d no exposure to text based programming, it's a perfect intro tool. We've bought four Epson T3 SCARA robots a year for about the past three years. It's an expectation that we would continue to add Epson T3 SCARA robots to our curriculum. [MUSIC PLAYING]