What are the applications of cooperative robots?
The reason why cooperative robots come to the fore is that they can play a role in the field of work that was originally completely completed manually. Due to the inherent safety of cooperative robots, such as the application of force feedback and collision detection, the safety of cooperation between people and cooperative robots will be guaranteed. Here are four common application scenarios of cooperative robots.
1. Picking and Placing
For workers, manual picking and placing should be one of the repetitive tasks today. Boring operations are easy to cause workers to make mistakes, while highly repetitive body movements are also easy to lead to physical fatigue and injury. Starting from picking and placing tasks, the application of cooperative robots is a good start for reducing the repetitive work of workers. Picking and placing task refers to picking and placing the work piece in another place. In actual production, this operation can be used to pick up items from pallets or conveyor belts for packaging or sorting. Picking from the conveyor belt also requires advanced visual system support. The cooperative robot for picking and placing needs an end effector to grasp objects, which can be a fixture or a vacuum suction cup device.
2. Processing operation
Machining operation refers to any operation process that requires the use of tools to operate the work piece. Cooperative robots are commonly used in gluing, dispensing and welding processes. Each of these machining tasks requires the use of tools to repeat the fixed path. If new employees are used for these tasks, they need to invest a lot of time in training to meet the requirements of finished products. After using the cooperative robot, it can be copied to other robots after programming on one robot. At the same time, the cooperative robot also solves the problems of precision and repetitive operation of workers. Traditional welding robot systems usually require operators to have very good robot programming and welding knowledge.
The advantage of the cooperative robot system is to simplify programming, which can be realized only through the method of location and orientation recording or traditional CAD/CAM programming. It simplifies robot programming and allows workers with only welding experience to complete the programming of the cooperative robot. The interface of Poly-scope can help maintain a stable TCP speed and ensure that the robot can input raw materials at a constant speed. In this case, the end effector actuators used by robots vary depending on the type of fixed welding gun, sealant, glue, or solder paste.
3. Finishing operation
Hand tools must be used for manual fine processing and the operation process is usually laborious. The vibration generated by the tool may also cause injury to the operator. The cooperative robot can provide the force, repeatability and degree required for finishing. The types of finishing that robots can accomplish include polishing, grinding, and deburring. Robots can be taught to complete corresponding actions by manual teaching or computer programming. The force control system of the cooperative robot makes the robot more durable. Finish machining of parts with different sizes can be realized through the end actuator or built-in force sensing device.
4. Quality inspection
Finally, the cooperative robot can also inspect the quality of parts. This process usually includes comprehensive inspection of finished parts, high resolution image inspection of precision machined parts, and comparison and confirmation of parts and CAD models. Fixing multiple high-resolution cameras on the cooperative robot can automate the quality inspection process and quickly obtain the inspection results. High quality inspection and more accurate production batch can be obtained by using the cooperative robot for inspection. End effector, vision systems and software with high-resolution cameras are required to complete the inspection.