Kawasaki Robotics (USA), Inc. Develops Special Palletizing System
Brief Summary:
Kawasaki developed an automated system for wheel palletizing for TOPY, a producer of aluminum wheels. This system increases efficiency and product quality. The use of robots eliminates product damage by workers, as well as, injuries to them.
- In July of 2000, Kawasaki Robotics Inc. designed and installed a wheel palletizing system for TOPY's Paint Line #1 Wheel Palletizing operation.
- Kawasaki's goal was to design a fully automated robotic wheel palletizing system that increased productivity, decreased cost, decreased product damage, and eliminated the possibility of repetitive task injuries to personnel.
- When asked how this system is unique, Project Manager Mark Niemiec responded, ''There is no other system in the automotive wheel industry like this one!'' The end effector on robot #3 is especially unique-it's capable of handling trays and caps for six wheel sizes and empty pallets, without change over, using a combination of custom designed vacuum and pneumatic gripper tooling. System cycle time is only 3.4 seconds per wheel. The three robots are able to work in a small area with overlapping work zones, using zone clear signals. To accommodate the six wheel sizes, three sizes of wheel gripper fingers are used-changing them is simple and takes less than five minutes. The system also has a one-button system recovery function that automatically sends the robots to their home/start positions and resets the entire cell to restart from the beginning of the program. A restart can also be set to a particular layer and wheel number, so the system can restart from where it left off.
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