Adjusting Angular Alignment of Bag Placement on Pallet

    Good Morning All,


    I'm new to this forum, but have been working in Industrial Automation for the last 10 years or so as Mechanical Engineer. I'm getting more and more involved on the controls and robot programming side of things, and recently completed a couple of the Fanuc training classes in Rochester Hills, including PalletTool Programming.


    I asked the course instructor about this, but he wasn't able to answer the question: I have an installed palletizer robot running a bag gripper that was sub-contracted out (design and build.) The customer is running a product that is much narrower in width than anything else, so the infeed conveyor guides do not adjust far enough to properly position the product, and have already been modified to adjust more than the conveyor manufacturer wants. This means the bag is skewed on the conveyor at pick position. The EOAT has the same problem: the crowders do not actively engage on the product enough to align it.


    Because the bag comes around a corner before the pick position, they are consistently skewed one way, out of alignment by 50-75mm, corner to corner. Because this is a bag gripper and it reaches through the conveyor rollers, I can't just tweak the pick position for this Unit Load without crashing the EOAT into the rollers.


    I asked the course instructor if I could correct this misalignment within PalletTool when placing the bag on the pallet, but he didn't have a way to do it.


    Any thoughts or input on this would be appreciated - Thanks all!

    The only thing I know to change is the length and width positions. Now with that being said, you can always add custom code into the robot to do this. But the ideal thing to do is to fix the mechanical issue.

    Hi
    Why dont you put a removable diverter (angle bracket) on the conveyor rail. Adjust the angle until You can "kick" the part enough so it's straight.


    I never use Pallet software, but is there any way that you can teach a special tool frame that includes the angle.
    So basically you do everything the same and after pick up and while is going to place, change the tool. I imagine the software has a tool setup for placing

    Retired but still helping

    Quote from Fabian Munoz


    Hi
    Why dont you put a removable diverter (angle bracket) on the conveyor rail. Adjust the angle until You can "kick" the part enough so it's straight.


    I never use Pallet software, but is there any way that you can teach a special tool frame that includes the angle.
    So basically you do everything the same and after pick up and while is going to place, change the tool. I imagine the software has a tool setup for placing


    I agree with Fabian that the mechanical fix would be the best route. I tried PalletTool and found it had too many limitations, including how the TCP is defined. I will never use it and prefer to create my own palletizing logic from scratch in HandlingTool.

    I agree that the mechanical fix is the right one, but the direction I'm getting is to fix it in the robot program. (This might be driven by already having spent money we didn't have budgeted to fix a problem caused by the customer running a product not in the original scope.)


    I'll take a look at changing tool frames on the way to the pallet, because I think it actually already does this, based on my observation today.


    Thanks All!

    OMG


    "I agree that the mechanical fix is the right one, but the direction I'm getting is to fix it in the robot program. (This might be driven by already having spent money we didn't have budgeted to fix a problem caused by the customer running a product not in the original scope.)"


    and I thought I was the only one that listens those excuses . :uglyhammer2: :uglyhammer2:

    Retired but still helping

    The other thing you can do is some custom code when it goes to drop off. In PLONPAL, you can modify the actual place point. For example, if PR5 is your place position, you can do something like this:



    PR[66]=PR[66]-PR[66] (This zeros out that register.)
    PR[66]=PR[5] This moves the drop position in PR[5] into PR[66] for use later
    PR[66,6]=PR[66]+5 (This will take your actual drop position and move J6 position plus 5 degrees of rotation into that register.)
    L PR[66] (This will then be your official drop point)


    I have tried it with just adding the offset to PLONPAL directly on the drop PR, but sometimes Fanuc gets weird. So now we just use offsets like this. The hard part is when you rotate the bag 180 degrees, if you do. You will need to make your condition based upon that. So custom code gets kind of ugly that way.

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