Fully automated robotic bending mode

Fully automated robotic bending mode

With the booming development of the bending automatic robotization industry, efficient mold change and mold storage management has become an important factor limiting the efficiency of the production line.

The main role of the bending machine is to bend the metal sheet into a certain shape of the workpiece, through the replacement of the mold and multiple bending to get more complex cross-sectional shape, is an indispensable equipment in the sheet metal processing, is widely used in a variety of sheet metal processing industry, such as aircraft, ships, automotive, electronic equipment, instrumentation and medical equipment and other industries.

With the continuous development of these industries, the required bending workpieces are increasingly complex and large in number, which also puts forward new demands on the bending machine technology, namely, better bending technology and higher bending efficiency, in order to cope with the evolving needs of the industry, while the more complex the type of workpiece, the more types of tooling required, how to manage the numerous tooling is particularly important. Therefore, the study of automatic die change technology and trajectory algorithm of bending machine is of great significance.

At present, the mainstream automatic bending solution on the market is through the combination of robot and bending machine or the combination of manual quick clamps and tooling. This combination is suitable for high-volume production with less frequent die change, and the robot clamps the sheet metal parts for processing after the die clamping is completed. However, when the product is small batch with multiple batches, the tooling is changed frequently and the manual tooling change is time consuming and labor intensive, which cannot meet the demand of high efficiency and high quality. We adopt the method of bending machine plus manipulator plus WILA automatic die change system.

The new WILA automatic die change system and the manipulator complete the quick change of dies.

WILA automatic die change technology consists of two core technologies: ATC (Automatic Die Change Technology) and TIPS (Tool Identification and Positioning System.)

The ATC automatic die change technology, with an ATC interface on the die, can be used in conjunction with a robotic arm that meets the requirements, and the robotic arm grabs the die through the ATC interface for operation. The second core technology is TIPS, the mold identification and positioning system, which consists of several parts, such as TIPS identification tags, clamping systems with TIPS, controllers and PCs.

The robot arm knows the desired mold through the TIPS system and then grips the mold through the ATC interface to perform the operation.