New to ABB

    Hello my company is looking to implement robotics into its plastic extrusion lines I believe the best place to start is the packaging end of the line. the goal being to use a vision system for QC and the robots to grab a good one and place it in its packaging and any bad ones would be placed in a scrap pile.

    Looking around I believe the IRB 14000 YuMi as it has a vision system and the parts we would be picking up weigh in under 0.5lbs and these have a vision system option.

    My questions are:
    Has anyone used these before? how reliable would you say these are in terms of repeatability? and could this vision system be used for quality control or should I integrate a separate vision system?

    Hi autorobo32,

    I have experience with injection molding ABB robots and camera system.
    There are several solutions, but there depends on many factors.
    I thing after the machine the parts put on a conveyor, the camera must checking, and a robot must picking up.
    YuMi: good solution if the parts are small conponents, but the camera is integrated in the arm. Yumi is exists with only one arm.
    Delta robots: very fast, only with small or light parts. ABB IRB360 with Pickmaster3 camera system
    Any robots: You can use any robot (different size) with any camera system (integrated vision) or ABB Pickmaster3 camera system.
    The system can recognize any trained model, in any position, it see the scrap, and it can using position correction, if you would like palettizing.
    If you use conveyor tracking, then robot can following the parts in conveyor while pick up.

    Quote from RoboTux


    Delta robots: very fast, only with small or light parts. ABB IRB360 with Pickmaster3 camera system

    Well.... the 360 is capable of up to 8KG which is pretty decent, but with a delta robot (or any inverted robot for that matter) you get into a whole other dilemma and that's the structure to hold it and floor space.

    How are the parts extracted today ? Just ejected onto a conveyor under the machine or do you have 3ax "robot" extract them and place them onto a conveyor ?

    If you can afford it (time wise) it's usually better to have the robot extract the part from the press, that way you have control over it from the get go and don't have to spend money on fancy contraptions to try and locate it later (especially if the part isn't flat, so that you'd rely on crowding and/or 3D vision).

    Here's a rough idea of how our lines work. its a pretty simple process; Extruder grabs plastic, heats it up and melts it. That gets pushed
    through a dye which goes into a cooling area. Being pulled by a conveyor puller it makes its way to a cutting station where it is cut and dropped into a box for packaging.

    So what i was thinking was after the cutter I could have the robot with a vision system doing quality checks as they come through. It would then package the good ones and discard the bad.

    I was able to locate a dual armed Yumi 14000 but the reason i was thinking a dual armed robot was for the vision system in one hand and the manipulator on the other. this way i could move the part around the camera or vice versa. Hopefully that would decrease on inspection time while increasing reliability.

    A flexpicker would be a very good option unfortunately we don't have the space to hang it overhead.

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