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Robot tending Haas mill

Janger

(John)
Administrator
Vendor

I liked this. How does the robot place the stock exactly in the right place? What precision is this?

EDIT -> Ah at the beginning I think you can see a mill stop behind the part.
 

Tom Kitta

Ultra Member
Yeah I see the stop as well. Still I would guess the arm costs more then the Haas mill.

The arm has to be somewhat precise as well - part is slim and vice probably does not open up more then say 1mm over part size.

Cool video.
 

Janger

(John)
Administrator
Vendor
The arm Modern tool had on display during their open house was $125K. I imagine you can spend less but that's still more than a mill.
 

Janger

(John)
Administrator
Vendor
What would the payback be on a machine that's running 24 hrs a day doing those parts? If you filled up that loading board with blanks I imagine it would go overnight before it ran out of stock.

That's a fast mill too. fast tool changes and fast table speeds.

@Alexander you had a robot at one point that was tending a machine at work. Whatever happened with that?
 

Alexander

Ultra Member
Administrator
Yeah those robots are still going strong. A little background first. I am a robotics technician and I was trained to program fanuc robots that were being used for machine tending. More on that later because right now I need to go back inside and run the CNC no robots in this shop. Those arms were at another shop.
 

Alexander

Ultra Member
Administrator
That material handling robot is really tiny. My guess is accuracy is only about .03" The part gets positioned against the stop without bumping it because the end of arm tooling is somewhat spring loaded. The robot will gently apply spring pressure while the work holding clamps the part.
 

Janger

(John)
Administrator
Vendor
Anybody have any ideas about what that part being made might be worth? I could then work out some vague ROI estimates.
 

Alexander

Ultra Member
Administrator
Sometimes it isn't about ROI it is about capacity. Let's say for example you can't find employees willing to work third shift or weekends. The robot can fill in the gaps and get your machine hours up. Many companies are limited by space or time.
 

Janger

(John)
Administrator
Vendor
Here is another video from the same facility. CNC Lathe this time.


After the door closes you can see the robot hits the start button on the machine console to run the part program.
 
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