Time to look at tending your CNC Machining Centre with a Robot?
PICTURE: The UR5 from Universal Robots with the Control Box and Teach Pendant. Design Energy, appearing on Stand 2075, says to remain competitive engineering companies are constantly looking for ways to reduce the cost of producing parts. Some are spending significant amounts money on larger capacity machines, specialised tooling and CAM software which will optimise cycle times. In many cases shaving seconds off a cycle time is celebrated as a win. But three times a day, the machine stops for 15 to 30 minutes while the operator is at smoko or lunch. Most engineering companies running CNC Machining Centres would ask themselves at some point; what is the cost/benefit in automating the loading of the machine? A bar feed on a CNC Lathe is a cheap way to automate the machine loading process, and this has proved to be a ‘no-brainer’ for those application able to apply it. But what about all those other applications a bar cannot be applied to? A 6-axis robot is a great solution for these applications. So why isn’t everyone doing it? The short answer is that the technology is still catching up. Currently most robots are difficult to program and this programming time (up to 60 minutes for a simple loading operation) means the robot can only be economically applied to large runs of 1000 or more parts. In many New Zealand machine shops the batch sizes are more like 5 – 50 parts. Spending an hour programming a robot to load 5 parts does not make sense. Universal Robots, from Denmark focused on this issue when designing their latest robots, the UR5 and UR10. With this in mind they developed affordable, flexible robots which can be programmed to load a CNC Machine in 5 – 10 minutes. The programming time has been slashed […]