Collaborative robots are used for loading and unloading of reducer machine tools

01 Background

There are only a handful of manufacturers in the world that can provide large-scale and reliable RV reducers, and the research of RV reducers for industrial robots by domestic enterprises started late, and the "production, learning, research and use" has not yet formed a closely integrated collaborative innovation pattern, and the conversion rate of technological achievements is low, which restricts the development of China's robot and automation equipment industry. In order to achieve a "breakthrough against the trend", R&D is the foundation and intelligent manufacturing is the key. A well-known reducer factory located in Jiangsu has long been aware of this problem, the company's penetration rate in the harmonic reducer market is more than 80%, the market share is more than 50%, the annual shipment is 600,000 units, and the growth rate is more than 40% every year. On the one hand, their products are an important component of many robot manufacturers, and on the other hand, they continue to explore the use of robots to replace manual labor and improve the existing work efficiency and rhythm.

02 pain points

After several years of development, the customer had a high level of automation, and they realized that if they wanted to tap into the potential of factory automation, they needed to pay attention to those flexible workstations and scenarios where manual labor was still used. Machine tool loading and unloading and detection are two directions worth trying, because there is a long waiting time when CNC machine tool processing, so there is a large amount of idle labor when loading and unloading manually. Is it possible for robots to do this kind of repetitive, mechanical work? Fortunately, the customer quickly found a robot manufacturer to work with them and invited engineers to evaluate the solution on site - including Elite in addition to traditional industrial robot manufacturers. The cycle time of this station is not very demanding, and the processing time of each piece is about 60S. However, the space of the workstation where manual loading and unloading was used was small, and the huge structure of traditional robots was useless here.

03 Solution

In this system, the automatic feeding mechanism sends the materials to the position of the robot, and the robot detects the mechanism to ensure that the materials are successfully grabbed, and then probes into the CNC machine tool for superheat treatment, and then the robot takes out the processed materials and parts, and at the same time sends the next materials that need to be processed, and then moves them to the tray to complete the action of finished product blanking. Although the whole set of actions is not much faster than that of human hands (because the processing waiting time of the processing machine is the bottleneck of the station), the robot can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a day, and the overall efficiency has increased by more than 30%, which is more accurate than manual operation. As a result, customers consider cobots to be a good choice for these applications.

"We believe that enterprises should open their minds in the matter of automation upgrading, in addition to finding large-scale application scenarios, those almost empty workstations can also be transformed with their brains." The head of the customer engineering department said: "These reducers are used by robot manufacturers, and they use robots in their manufacturing. It's a good idea to build a robot out of a robot! ”

Collaborative robots are used for loading and unloading of reducer machine tools

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