Page 37 - MetalForming May 2017

The collaborative robots come with touchscreen pendants for simplified programming. Associates program a robot arm via arrow keys on the touchscreen or simply by grabbing the robot arm and teaching it the desired moves between waypoints.
for the UR10 robot to pick up and place on a conveyor for final assembly.
“Cutting some 16,000 wires per day by hand is a potential carpal-tunnel-syndrome application,” says Bush. “We thought that was a great place to put robots—let them get carpal-tunnel!”
Working in tandem, the robots communicate their posi- tions to each other through Modbus socket connections.
“We can interlock multiple robots together and read, through Modbus, the TCP connections and robot status,” explains Cook. “We also can pass information to other soft- ware packages, and collect data. It opens up a lot of doors to do a lot of things that we’re just now beginning to look at.”
The company’s transformer line is another where the robots have proven productive.
“Before placing the URs on our transformer line, we aver- aged about 10 parts per person per hour,” says Goldiez. That’s up to 12 parts now, so about a 20-percent increase by having a pacesetting UR working alongside of our people.”
One new application employing the robots for data col- lection is in the live testing of new designs, where a small motor manufactured at SFEG is placed in a customer’s product.
“We then use one of our mobile robots to turn the prod- uct’s switch on and off, running it for a minute on, 30 seconds off, for the next 400 hours,” says Bush, noting that the robot collects data pertinent to the test such as max amperage, average amperage and the number of cycles completed,
12:28
YSM is a world leader in producing vertislides for bending, stamping, and forming of strip, wire, and tubing. YSM offers mechanical, hybrid, and fully CNC vertislides, which are high speed, cost effective, and allow material savings over traditional progressive die stamping.
Michael Shapiro | mshapiro@gibraltar8.com | 847-383-5442
www.metalformingmagazine.com
MetalForming/May 2017 35