The industry is always striving to continuously improve production efficiency. With robotics production lines can achieve greater flexibility and production capacity. However, the introduction of robots into a production line requires proper design of the other machines that the robot will tend to.
Common operations we encounter in production are machine servicing and assembly, which in some cases can be described as the process of peg-in-hole insertion. Although this operation appears to be simple, it can cause problems with narrow tolerances and larger workpieces. That can lead to collisions of the robot, workpiece, and other machines as a result of poor repeatability of the feeder, robot, or gripper, compliance of the elements, or a combination of multiple causes.
In our case, we removed the rotor from the feeder with a gripper on the robot and inserted it into the jaw of the lathe where occasional random collisions occurred. The goal of the task is the analysis of the causes and the elimination of collisions. Through measurements, we found that the cause is not simple, but it is a complex interaction of several factors. Based on the results of the analysis, we successfully introduced changes that significantly reduced the frequency of collisions.
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