Has anyone ever made a semi-portable machine tending robot cell? Our machines are Horizontal CNC's. We would like to have something that we could put in front of a machine for a while with the possibility of moving it if we needed to. Just curious what every ones thoughts were on this....
Universal Machine Tending Robot
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robmx57 -
August 25, 2015 at 5:38 PM -
Thread is marked as Resolved.
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These devices show up on the market every few years. Phone booth-sized boxes with a generic input rack and output rack, ready for customization for the user's parts. A generic program template supposedly to make it easy to deploy.
One unit I remember from Europe used a Staubli arm. The design allowed one to roll it up to a machine, teach a few custom points, connect a couple signal lines, and start loading / unloading the machine tool. In theory.
Another unit I saw was a product offering from Fanuc made in a very similar manner.
These things are good ideas IMHO, but they never seem to gain traction in the marketplace. Don't know why, except that perhaps (1) manufacturing is too dynamic, (2) not as simple to deploy as advertised, and (3) you still need a robot programmer on staff to do "the second deployment."
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I have speculated in the past if the "Baxter" robot, or perhaps the Co-bots from Universal Robotics, might make good candidates for this kind of work. They're safe to use around humans with no fencing, run from regular wall-socket power without special wiring, and can be easily and quickly taught to do simple tasks. One might even be able to program them to push the buttons on a CNC machine by hand, rather than needing to wire in I/O.