Collaborative Robotics for Industrial Coating Cells
Description
Challenge:
The experiment is being conducted at FLUPOL, a Portuguese SME specialized in the coating of complex and delicate products, a highly scrupulous process that, due to the accuracy and reliability requirements, can only be performed manually, by high-skilled operators with more than 8 years of training, or by robots programmed by demonstration, due to the finesse and complexity of the manoeuvres required by the process. Although the introduction of industrial manipulators increases the overall efficiency of the process, one of the main limitations of the current solution is the difficulty to teach coating operations on objects with large dimensions and/or complex geometries.
Solution
Incorporate safety features in an existing industrial robotic cell, dedicated to advanced coating application, leading to an enhancement in the cooperation between highly skilled operators and industrial robots in an especially meticulous operation, conducted on highly customized products of large dimensions and complex geometry.
Design of the collaborative workcell
Implementation time: 9 months
Implementation cost: €190,400
Outputs
First collaborative robotic application in the industry of coating.
Before the experiment up to 30% of the parts are handled manually, due to complexity and size. The introduction of the collaborative workcell, with a shared workload of 50%, increases the overall throughput of the company in 15%, thus increasing the competitiveness of FLUPOL.
Impact
The experiment allowed the development of innovations such as the validation of a 3D safety sensor in a collaborative robotic system for coating applications, the integration in the HORSE framework of an innovative method for programming by demonstration, and the development of an object recognition and localization toolbox.
This experiment has been supported by Horse project. (See this experiment in project’s site)
Project:
Enterprises:
FLUPOL Surface Engineering (End-user); Talus Smart Robotics (Tech provider); INESC TEC Tecnologia e Ciencia (RTO). ‘
Sector
Other manufacturing
Keywords
