Curtains of light and other safety devices for robotic workcells

Robot­ic work­cells, just like any oth­er sys­tem, need safe­ty mea­sures to keep work­ers out of the robot’s area dur­ing oper­a­tion. Many work­cells use safe­ty light cur­tains to per­form this task.

Safe­ty light cur­tains are opti­cal elec­tron­ic devices are a form of machine guard­ing that can be used instead of using phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers. These cur­tains are made from beams of light that are sequenced and pulsed across an area from a trans­mit­ter to a receiver.

Robot­ic work­cells use these pres­ence detec­tion devices to ensure that noth­ing gets close enough to the robot to be harmed dur­ing the run­ning of a cycle. If some­thing cross­es that bar­ri­er dur­ing the robot workcell’s oper­a­tion, the oper­a­tion will stop to safe­guard workers.

Along with light cur­tains, robot work­cells can also use safe­ty mats that are pres­sure sen­si­tive to guard an area. If some­thing steps on these mats dur­ing oper­a­tion, it can cause the appli­ca­tion to pause as well, keep­ing the work­er out of harm’s way.

There are also phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers like inter­lock­ing doors that will slide down when a robot­ic work­cell is oper­a­tional, not allow­ing any­one into the work­cell dur­ing the cycle. These doors then slide open when the oper­a­tion is fin­ished so that work­ers or oth­er robots can col­lect the parts and send them on to oth­er parts of the line.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor of robot­ic work­cells for many com­pa­nies, includ­ing Motoman, Fanuc, ABB, and KUKA, has many options avail­able for your automa­tion process. Robots​.com even has its own group­ing of robot­ic work­cells for cus­tomers to consider.

Each work­cell comes with one or more robots, a posi­tion­er and a safe­ty pack­age, along with extras like a weld­ing pack­age or oth­er end-of-arm-tool­ing, depend­ing on what fea­tures the cus­tomer requests.

For more infor­ma­tion on robot­ic work­cells and how to inte­grate one into your shop, con­tact Robots​.com today online or at 877−762−6881.