Magazine

Heating techniques and anthropomorphic automation: the perfect mix for an efficient and easy-to-maintain solution

Request

This line arose from our customer’s need to process a series of previously moulded parts to give them their final shape and shear off excess material. This process was to be done under condition of heat, so that the material could be deformed without the risk of cracking or brittleness.

The complexity lay in the need to automatically handle 25 preformed parts per minute, keeping them oriented in the heating phase so they could be picked up “in phase” in the forming area.

Solution

A vibrating canal system was chosen for piece selection and alignment, through which parts are loaded into a hopper and processed by the vibrating system.

For subsequent heating, we chose a flat-chain furnace, on which the parts are deposited sorted in two parallel rows. To do this we used a robot integrated with a dual-camera vision system.

As a gripping organ, we designed and built a device that uses vacuum to pick up the parts, which are later arranged in a fishbone pattern on the hot mat, ready to enter the 700°C chamber.

The parts are transported inside the furnace: on the way out, a robot equipped again with a vacuum technology gripping system picks them up on the fly and takes them to the moulding area.

Focus and benefits

• Innovative implementation of our technical expertise in heating and anthropomorphic automation in a single line.
• Design, testing and industrialization of a solution not yet commercially available, the vacuum gripping of a part at 700°C.
• Development of an advanced graphics-based virtual work environment that eliminates the need for robot programming and allows intuitive operator interaction.
• Reduced tooling of the machine, which, once the dimensional parameters of the parts and the required production rate are entered, automatically sets itself.
• Customer autonomy in handling simple machine maintenance tasks, which are rarely needed.