Small Bending Part Automation

We have set out to build a robotic bending cell!  We did an analysis on all of our bent parts and a large percentage of them are small enough to be bent by a robot on a 4ft press brake.  Trying to be distruptive in manufacturing, we are stripping the brake of all controls and writing all of the logic into the robot controller.  As far as we know, no one has attempted to use a “dumb” brake in combination with a “smart” robot.  We found a “no name” press brake and we are using Motomans newest and best material handling robot.  We are at the very beginning of this project but wanted to share some progress of the cell coming alive.

One may ask the question; what does Lean Machine know about building equipment?  The answer is nothing!  We do know our own equipment well and it takes a lot of in-house technical knowledge to keep it performing at it’s peak. We also know how to integrate technology into our customer’s part manufacturing process and this project is an extension of that knowledge.  As with all projects at Lean Machine this is to give our customers a better price on parts with a higher level of quality!

This is the first part we want to bend.  It’s small so the operator has to over-ride the safety light curtain  on each hit which means the activation pedal gets hit twice per bend (4 times per part) which is brutal on an operator when a batch of 500 is the norm.

Here is an overall view of the robot and brake.  Lots of wires still hanging around during testing and start up.