I've been walking around looking for areas where automation and robotics would be a good fit in our company. We have the standard areas, machine loading, deburring, welding and assembly that could be done with standard automation and or robots.
The one area that I think would be a perfect fit, not terribly expensive and a great way to get our feet wet without interrupting a "mission critical" system is an assembly process for one of our products.
We have a tombstone product, many of which, have lots of holes that require a thread insert, bushing and cap. The general gist of the system, robot, feeders, endeffectors etc I have a pretty good idea of how to do and what is needed. The area that I think is most open is the robot control.
These tombstones come in many different sizes and shapes(number and width of sides). The hole patterns are also relatively non standard despite the fact we do have a standard grid pattern. Probably 80% of the units we do have non standard hole patterns.
So I'm wondering if any of you have any experience or have heard of something for programming bots that would fit the bill. Things I have tossed around so far.
Whole face Vision – Scan the face locate the holes>Tells the robot where to go (Adds considerable expense, especially since some of our tombstones are large. Creates a constant space consumption issue as the vision system would have to be able to see the entire face)
Robot Vision – Some sort of vision system that would be connected to the end effector. (Robot scans face of robot with the camera leading and identifies holes as it moves. Forced to scan entire face which may or may not be a time consumer depending on scan rates)
Automatic programming based on model – This makes the most sense to me as you could place the model and not only does the robot know where the holes are but the system also knows when to rotate to the next side, number of sides, sides that may not have holes in them, different size holes etc etc.
I just don't have the experience or exposure to robots to know what the best approach is here or if something exists or there is "Something new" that is what I'm looking for. I've done and have used all of the above in different applications, just not with robots. For instance programming from a model is essentially the standard for CNC programming these days. Does something like that exist for robots....if not maybe that's what I should be working on instead of this project
![Cool 8-)](./images/smilies/icon_cool.gif)
I've sent something similar to the above to a couple of our vendors that also sell bots but thought I'd see what others here may have seen or been exposed to as well....1000 heads better than one an all.
Any thoughts appreciated