Com­plex robot appli­ca­tions sim­ply implemented

Solve com­plex automa­tion tasks easily

The fol­low­ing exam­ple illus­trates the result­ing advan­tages. Dur­ing the auto­mated quat­tro­Clean process to clean strongly-struc­tured com­po­nents with free-form sur­faces, under­cuts, and inte­grated pipes, the robot must be capa­ble of pre­cisely tra­vers­ing com­plex path curves and geome­tries. Using con­ven­tional tech­niques to pro­gram and align these motion sequences is extremely dif­fi­cult and time-con­sum­ing and requires a great deal of expert knowledge.
In con­trast, CAD parts data can be eas­ily imported into the 3D sim­u­la­tion envi­ron­ment and offline pro­gram­ming with the ArtiMinds RPS soft­ware tool, which then gen­er­ates the nec­es­sary motion paths auto­mat­i­cally. The sequence of the var­i­ous processes, i.e. the move­ments and work steps that the robot has to per­form dur­ing clean­ing, is gen­er­ated by drag­ging and drop­ping pre- pro­grammed func­tion mod­ules. The robot’s teach-in mode can then be used to align the sequence to the part and thus test the pro­gram. In the last step, the gen­er­ated pro­gram is auto­mat­i­cally trans­lated into the robot’s tar­get lan­guage. Sup­ple­mented by process- and task-spe­cific para­me­ters, such as jet time, pres­sure and vol­ume flows for car­bon diox­ide and com­pressed air, as well as the num­ber of jet noz­zles, the appli­ca­tion can be effec­tively auto­mated with robots in a com­par­a­tively short time.
When apply­ing foils and sub­strates, includ­ing touch foils and flex­i­ble PCB’s to curved sur­faces, it is essen­tial to avoid air pock­ets or par­tic­u­late con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. In addi­tion, the robot has to peel off the pro­tec­tive layer with­out dam­ag­ing the foil under­neath. To ensure this, the robot has a grip­per mod­elled on the human hand that holds the foil as a roll and applies it to the sur­face with­out entrap­ping any air. This task is also one of the appli­ca­tions that places high demands on robot pro­gram­ming when it comes to automa­tion. Up till now, numer­ous costly pro­gram­ming hours, exten­sive test runs, and adjust­ments were required to pre­cisely adapt the motion path to the respec­tive free-form sur­face. The fact that CAD data for path gen­er­a­tion and sen­sory com­po­nents can be inte­grated promises to sig­nif­i­cantly sim­plify and shorten robot pro­gram­ming for these appli­ca­tions as well. In addi­tion, any nec­es­sary changes can be made quickly and effi­ciently in-house.