4 case studies: industrial robots run the production line

A Yaskawa robotic system had two robots for palletizing and two for de-palletizing (Figure 2). Every four seconds, a robot takes a 36-by-48-inch slab of flooring, which eventually a machine will cut into individual flooring tiles. Before that, the robot palletizes the slab. Because the flooring lamination process can cause extreme heat and fire, if the production line starts to back up, the manufacturer cannot stop the line. “If the robot goes down, then we have to drop a stop and eject to a manual shoot,” Haley said. “That was some of the gymnastics.”
With hydraulic lift tables and level sensors, the system keeps the pass line of the conveyor and the material stack at the same level, so the robot makes a simple movement.
A fully articulated robot was not needed for that process in particular, but one was introduced into this system to pick divider boards between material at multiple pick locations. “We had two stack locations, two divider board locations and then incoming product at two positions and then a manual stop that would drop if any of it was missed,” Haley says.
Each process had to be done within four seconds, and the design also had to skew and line the material up to a flat edge. Then the process did the inverse, taking the slabs back off the stacks, though not as fast-paced as the incoming production line with a process upstream pushing the robot. “Obviously, they want to be able to feed the downstream fast enough to get their material out at a similar speed, but now we don’t have to worry about stopping and damaging the machine or material,” Haley says. The type of flooring coming down the line also varies quite a bit, anything from plywood to ornate finished flooring.
“When you get to the bottom of a pallet, how do you tell the difference between the pallet and the flooring?” Haley asks, as the wood-based pallets and the flooring can look similar. “What we did was we designed an end-of-arm tool that had cylinders that act as deflectors. Each time the robot would pick the flooring up, it would actually push on the flooring, and, if the flooring had enough rigidity, then we knew if it was wood pallet or a divider board,” Haley says. The system also had a double-check with sensors and a simple vision system that would look at the bottom of the pallet. “We had a lot of redundant checks, and the rigidity check was something that was pretty ingenious from our engineers,” he adds.
3. Appliance buffing system
ARC has done a lot of work for Viking and its sub-brand of grills, Lynx, with products such as pizza ovens, a grill canopy for a grill system and a patio infrared heater. The manufacturer was struggling with the manual buffing of the high-end stainless-steel appliances. “It was just a very labor-intensive, very manual process,” Haley says. Before buffing, the appliances also needed precise taping along lines and features for a clean look.
The manufacturer had already purchased two robotic buffing systems, which were supposed to be working together but were not integrated properly. ARC programmed and integrated the buffing system with two Yaskawa robots and a Fanuc robot. The two Yaskawa systems were built from scratch, and ARC modified the Fanuc robot system in place.
“We helped them fix some of that process,” Haley says. “In any solution where you’re grinding, you really have to watch the torque feedback and position to be able to accurately gauge and perfect the material.” Before ARC, the robots and cycles were working, but the quality and throughput were greatly affected by missing details and the ability to fix those problems based on that data. “When we did our system, we showed them that they could do all that with the same components,” Haley says.
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