1. Pick and Place
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. Equipment care
Equipment care requires workers to stand for a long time in front of CNC machine tools, injection molding machines or other similar equipment, so as to always pay attention to the operation needs of the machine, such as replacing tools or replenishing raw materials. This process is time-consuming and tedious for operators. In this case, the use of cooperative robots not only liberates employees, but also enables one cooperative robot to maintain multiple machines, which improves productivity. Nursing cooperative robots require I/O docking hardware for specific devices. These hardware prompts the robot when to enter the next cycle of production or when to replenish raw materials.
3. Packaging and palletizing
Packaging and palletizing of products belong to a subcategory of the picking and placing category. Before leaving the factory workshop, the products need to be properly prepared for transportation, including shrink packaging, box assembly and loading, box sorting, and pallet placement for shipment. This type of work has a high repetition rate and contains some small loads, which is very suitable for replacing manual work with cooperative robots. Rapid product replacement is the key to the business of mass production enterprises with high and low production volumes. This application requires the use of conveyor belt tracking to synchronize robot and conveyor belt movements. For products with inconsistent shape, visual system shall also be used.
4. 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.