Assemble the Software for the Robotic Assembly Line

Imag­ine doing the same task every sec­ond of every day. Bored just think­ing about it? Enter robot­ic assem­bly!

Auto­mat­ed assem­bly pro­duces prod­ucts faster and more pre­cise­ly than human assem­bly, ulti­mate­ly increas­ing out­put and decreas­ing costs. Not to men­tion, robots don’t get fatigued or need vacations!

In order to get the job done per­fect­ly, assem­bly robot soft­ware has been designed to pro­mote high-speed pre­ci­sion, as well as ensur­ing spe­cial care in the han­dling of parts of dif­fer­ent sizes dur­ing the assem­bly process. The lead­ing robot com­pa­nies have rec­og­nized the need for tac­tile or touch sense soft­ware that adapts to feed­back from a force sen­sor. This helps the robot oper­ate as if it were human, and ulti­mate­ly pro­vide bet­ter results for everyone. 

In addi­tion, vision has been includ­ed in soft­wares for pre­cise place­ment and guid­ance when assem­bling parts. Robots can’t ordi­nar­i­ly see and react as humans do, but the lat­est vision soft­ware gets it pret­ty close! They can locate parts to be picked up, deter­mine where to place a part, and inspect parts that have already been assembled.

Take a look at what assem­bly soft­ware options the robot­ic com­pa­nies have in store for you.

Fanuc

Fanuc​’s iRVi­sion soft­ware is is an all-inclu­sive robot­ic vision prod­uct inte­grat­ed into the main com­put­er of every robot man­u­fac­tured. This elim­i­nates the need for oth­er ven­dors, smart cam­eras, or extra com­put­ers on the floor. iRVi­sion is extreme­ly user friend­ly; with the instruc­tion set inte­grat­ed it has fast set-up options and sim­ple appli­ca­tion build­ing. More­over, the con­fig­u­ra­tions are scal­able and it has high-speed vision com­mu­ni­ca­tion and processing.

iR Vision gives you a few options based on your needs. You can choose a 2D guid­ance prod­uct that will accu­rate­ly move the robot to the loca­tion of your part. This elim­i­nates the need for expen­sive posi­tion­ing fix­tures. There is also 3D vision guid­ance avail­able that projects lasers that allow the 3DL Sen­sor to quick­ly find all 6 dimen­sions (X, Y, Z, W, P, R). Visu­al Line track­ing gives the abil­i­ty to pick prod­ucts from a mov­ing con­vey­or. Anoth­er route is Visu­al Guid­ed (de)palletizing that enables 2D cam­eras to lever­age the size of parts and deter­mine the Z depth. Final­ly, the Dig­i­tal Video Mon­i­tor enables the cre­ation of an image or video archive of pro­duc­tion by trig­ger­ing a timer to record at cer­tain times. DVM pro­duces trace­abil­i­ty require­ments, trou­ble shoot errors, or iso­late prod­uct variations. 

Anoth­er soft­ware option by Fanuc is the Han­dling Tool that can be inte­grat­ed with a Fanuc robot and con­troller. It pro­vides an effec­tive process solu­tion for assem­bly appli­ca­tions as it has built-in func­tions, menu-dri­ven pro­gram­ming tools, and point-and-shoot posi­tion teach­ing fea­tures that allows inex­pe­ri­enced users to cre­ate pro­grams and run pro­duc­tion easily. 

Motoman

Motoman​’s Moto­Sight is an inte­grat­ed vision solu­tion that is easy-to-inte­grate, com­pre­hen­sive, pow­er­ful, and sim­pli­fies the use of 3D vision for assem­bly. It offers the abil­i­ty to train new parts (sim­ple or com­plex) in sec­onds and the capa­bil­i­ty of rec­og­niz­ing a large num­ber of objects, col­or cam­era tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides addi­tion­al object detail

The inter­face is easy-to-use; it has a sim­ple point-and-click teach­ing guide and there is no cam­era cal­i­bra­tion or addi­tion­al pro­gram­ming required due to advanced algo­rithm. This cam­era will take sev­er­al pic­tures and then uses auto-refine­ment to pro­vide incred­i­ble accu­ra­cy in order to opti­mal­ly locate the part and its posi­tion with­in the six degrees of free­dom. This fea­ture also allows it to rec­og­nize and learn a large num­ber of objects regard­less of their posi­tion with­in the cam­era field of view. 

KUKA

KUKA is open­ing up a new range of poten­tial automa­tion appli­ca­tions for a wide vari­ety of man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es mak­ing oper­a­tion quick and easy for a robot as a machine tool.

The CAM­rob sys­tem com­bined with the Milling appli­ca­tion mod­ules offers the world it first com­plete sys­tem for auto­mat­ed Com­put­er Numer­i­cal Con­trol (CNC) machin­ing. The soft­ware auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates a robot pro­gram based on CNC data and the Milling appli­ca­tion mod­ules are used to inte­grate milling tools and addi­tion­al com­po­nents into a com­plete robot­ic sys­tem as stan­dard products. 

CAM­rob helps to max­i­mize work space, high qual­i­ty prod­uct, and increas­es func­tion­al­i­ty, flex­i­bil­i­ty, and ver­sa­til­i­ty as the soft­ware allows the robot to be adapt­ed at a moments notice to chang­ing pro­duc­tion process­es. This gives KUKA robots a breadth of the range of appli­ca­tions in which the cus­tom-con­fig­urable sys­tem offers out­stand­ing per­for­mance to mill, grind, glue, cut, engrave, saw, debur, fin­ish cast­ings, and han­dle and can, at any time.

When this soft­ware is com­pared with machine-assist­ed or man­u­al machin­ing, KUKA CAM­ROB achieves sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er process speeds, pre­ci­sion, and quality.

ABB

ABB​’s assem­bly soft­ware is called Robot­Ware Assem­bly Force Con­trol. It is an advanced soft­ware for force con­trol which includes a spe­cif­ic set of rapid instruc­tions. This soft­ware facil­i­tates the use of robots for tasks that need ​“touch sens­ing” such as fix­tur­ing, prod­uct test­ing, and assembly. 

The RW Assem­bly FC uses the robot move­ments to adapt to the feed­back from a force sen­sor. This enables the robot to search for the cor­rect loca­tion and assem­ble parts using intel­li­gent force/​torque motion with­out any risk of jam­ming or part damage.

This soft­ware equips a robot with tac­tile sense that gives the robot human-work­er han­dling capa­bil­i­ties. For instance, a robot with RW Assem­bly FC can search along a pre­de­fined pat­tern and attempt to push until parts slip into posi­tion with only small con­tact forces used. This will save instal­la­tion and pro­gram­ming costs and reduce aver­age process cycle time, due to eas­i­er pro­gram­ming and less assem­bly prob­lems in production.

Assem­bly FC can also be used for prod­uct test­ing, with­out any over­load, where the objec­tive is to apply forces and torque in order to sim­u­late nor­mal use, such as seats, steer­ing wheels, switch­es, levers, etc.

This soft­ware makes it pos­si­ble to auto­mate assem­bly tasks that may have pre­vi­ous­ly been too demand­ing. It is now pos­si­ble to assem­ble parts with arbi­trary posi­tions or tol­er­ances in the size of hun­dreds of mil­lime­ters. Ulti­mate­ly, this allows for a high­er qual­i­ty in pro­duc­tion and less prod­uct damages.

Con­tact Us! 

Inter­est­ed in enhanc­ing your assem­bly with any of these soft­ware options? Robots​.com pro­vides mul­ti­ple types of robot­ic assem­bly soft­ware with their robots. Con­tact us?? today for deter­min­ing which one is right for your com­pa­ny at 877−762−6881.