Integrated Force Control with ABB

If you are look­ing to improve your sand­ing, pol­ish­ing, or fin­ish­ing of wood­en parts, look no fur­ther than ABB’s inte­grat­ed Force Con­trol soft­ware. ABB always keeps the cus­tomer in mind; this is reflec­tive in the qual­i­ty in their robots and the com­pa­ny’s incred­i­ble cus­tomer ser­vice. The automa­tion solu­tions cre­at­ed by ABB help the wood indus­tries to increase their total pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, bring unmatched pre­ci­sion, incred­i­bly fast ROI, and increase the over­all speed of their prod­uct output.

With these sta­tis­tics, it is no sur­prise that they are one of the lead­ing robot man­u­fac­tur­ers serv­ing the wood sec­tor. This makes ABB and their Force Con­trol soft­ware the per­fect solu­tion for help­ing the lat­est wood indus­try demands and devel­op­ments. ABB is already very rel­e­vant in sev­er­al wood indus­tries already. They are already involved in aid­ing the inte­gra­tion of automa­tion sys­tems and deliv­er­ing a rapid return on invest­ment for world lead­ers such as IKEA, VELUX, and Sved­plan. Their inno­v­a­tive approach and total capa­bil­i­ty means the high­est lev­el of qual­i­ty will be expect­ed and produced. 

This flex­i­ble soft­ware tech­nol­o­gy enables robots to sense their envi­ron­ment and work piece, fur­ther pro­vid­ing the abil­i­ty to quick­ly adapt to vary­ing sur­faces and con­sis­ten­cy of mate­ri­als. It com­bines vision and feel to fur­ther improve robot’s tol­er­ances of the vari­abil­i­ty found in real-world assem­bly and fin­ish­ing oper­a­tions. These two items alone raise the tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties of robots, great­ly improv­ing the over­all eco­nom­ics of using them for any fin­ish­ing job, espe­cial­ly those with wood­en parts. 

ABB’s Force Con­trol Technology

ABB’s ful­ly inte­grat­ed force con­trol is a pre-con­fig­ured soft­ware and hard­ware that gives real-time tac­tile feed​back​.It is a one stop shop for advanced force con­trol func­tion­al­i­ty and helps to help cre­ate extreme pre­ci­sion, reduce cycle times, and improve the over­all process qual­i­ty. ABB’s force con­trol is also able to save pro­gram­ming time, mea­sure geo­met­ri­cal dif­fer­ences, and increase the life of process tools. All of these attrib­ut­es also help to decrease the ini­tial set­up and over­all pro­gram­ming and train­ing time. 

There are three fea­tures that unite to increase the dimen­sion of the robots use in wood indus­tries that fur­ther pro­vide faster pro­cess­ing times, high prod­uct qual­i­ty, an increase in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and reduced pro­gram­ming times. These fea­tures include FC Graph­i­cal Pro­gram­ming Inter­face, FC Pres­sure, and FC Speed Change. These help pro­duce high per­for­mance real-time path cor­rec­tion based on sen­sor feed­back which gives it a very fast response time. Also, there are fea­tures that allow for recov­ery and supervision.

When the force con­trol is ful­ly inte­grat­ed in the robot, all of the required com­po­nents are pro­vid­ed in order to eas­i­ly use the Force sen­sor. Oth­er options include the robot to be mount­ed or room fixed shield­ed high-flex cables, volt­age mea­sure­ment board, mea­sure­ment inter­face to IRC5 con­troller, high over­load pro­tec­tion (10 times nom­i­nal load), IP65 rat­ing, and, of course, the force con­trol software. 

ABB’s Vision Technology

Wood has nat­ur­al flaws, such as knots, worm­holes, bark pock­ets, etc., that require advanced soft­ware tech­nolo­gies. Man­u­fac­tur­ers are able to reduce the waste that these flaws would nor­mal­ly deem too tough to work with, by using robot­ic vision. Vision Guid­ed robot­ics (VGR) sys­tems are very easy to inte­grate nowa­days and able to deal with chang­ing envi­ron­ments by using light­ing, reflec­tions, and object sensing.

ABB uses a vision sys­tem that uses a sin­gle cam­era to locate parts in 2D, 2.5D, or a 3D space. This allows the automa­tion to take care of oper­a­tions that used to neces­si­tate human involve­ment. Addi­tion­al­ly, there is a reduced need for expen­sive fix­tur­ing, pre-arrang­ing, or plac­ing of parts.

When you com­bine vision sys­tems with force con­trol, it increas­es a robot’s abil­i­ty expo­nen­tial­ly. So ABB has a Machin­ing Force Con­trol (FC) func­tion to help increase the reli­a­bil­i­ty, adapt­abil­i­ty, and improve the con­sis­ten­cy and sur­face con­tour of the mate­ri­als being processed.

The appli­ca­tions to be used with this soft­ware span from grind­ing, sand­ing, and pol­ish­ing, to debur­ring and assem­bly. ABB also offers an adap­tive Force Con­trol pack­age for cus­tomers who would like to inte­grate the application/​process themselves. 

Con­tact Robots​.com and Auto­mate Today!

When com­pared with man­u­al labor, it is evi­dent that automa­tion brings huge gains. With the abil­i­ty to work 24-hours with no breaks, robot­ic tech­nol­o­gy brings high lev­els of out­put, low­er costs, enhanced and more con­sis­tent process and prod­uct qual­i­ty, and greater flex­i­bil­i­ty and effi­cien­cy. Robots also help to take over the haz­ardous tasks or envi­ron­ments those work­ers would be exposed to, improv­ing the over­all health and safe­ty of the workplace. 

ABB is deter­mined to help con­quer and solve the chal­lenge of the wood indus­tries with this intel­li­gent soft­ware. They have already suc­cess­ful­ly cre­at­ed effi­cient robot-based automa­tion for wood indus­tries and plan to con­tin­ue their lega­cy for years to come. 

Robots​.com rep­re­sen­ta­tives are ready to help you inte­grate a cus­tomized auto­mat­ed sys­tem, today! Con­tact Robots​.com experts online or at 877−762−6881.