Sheet metal bending automation robot to replace manual work becomes an inevitable development trend

Sheet metal bending automation robot to replace manual work becomes an inevitable development trend

Bending process plays an important role in the whole sheet metal processing process, and the good or bad bending process directly affects the final size and appearance of the product.
In the process of sheet metal bending and forming, each bending machine needs to be equipped with an operator in the traditional operation. Because of the huge variety and quantity of products required by various industries, and the fact that bending machines belong to a higher category of dangerous production equipment and have greater safety risks, this production process is becoming a more and more dangerous job, so replacing manual work with robots is gradually becoming an inevitable development trend.

Compared with manual work, the advantages of bending robots are reflected in three aspects: efficiency, safety and quality. The first two advantages are obvious, while the quality advantages are mainly reflected in two aspects: First, the positioning of bending robots is accurate and repeatable; second, the accidents caused by worker fatigue are eliminated.
In today’s manufacturing industry, sheet metal bending and forming has penetrated into many industries, such as automotive, home appliances, electrical, kitchenware, electronics and consumer goods.

In China, some large electrical cabinet and home appliance manufacturing enterprises have applied robot bending to actual production operations, but there are still more sheet metal manufacturing enterprises that have not yet realized or are planning the automation application program of this link.

For many small and medium-sized enterprises, their production specifications are not fixed, the output is small and unstable, and the bending machine needs to be changed and the upper and lower die cutters need to be adjusted frequently, resulting in changes in the reference position, and the robot needs to be calibrated repeatedly, which makes the advantages of robot operation not fully reflected. It is worth affirming that, with the improvement of robot intelligence and flexibility, these enterprises will gradually become potential customers for robot applications in the future.

Taking advantage of its natural advantages in the metal forming machine tool industry, Exton has customized bending robots with computerized automatic programming, intelligent automatic alignment, automatic following and other functions. It can meet most of the sheet metal bending application requirements and has cooperated with leading bending machine manufacturers both at home and abroad.

Among foreign brands, in addition to ABB, KUKA, Yaskawa and Fanuc, manufacturers such as Coma and Kawasaki also provide robots with bending following function.
In the past two years, under the guiding ideology of segmentation, domestic robot enterprises have also begun to enter and layout bending robots, including robot body enterprises, including the matching day robot, Qianjiang robot and new time, etc. Of course, behind the body enterprises, there is a part of the system integrator, which includes Keldar robot, Cui Feng technology, Joint Forces Bot automation, etc.

From robot body, control system, robot motor and driver, bending function package, all of them are independently developed.

Bending automation robot difficulties and breakthrough points

The difficulty of robot bending mainly lies in the robot to cooperate with the relevant tool workpiece follow and to ensure the accuracy of the movement process, for this reason, each company has made technical breakthroughs around these two aspects.

Exton uses its own technology and platform in robot control system and machine tool CNC system to achieve seamless connection and develop bending software package to achieve closed-loop control of the robot pallet during bending. In different bending speed, the robot to achieve automatic matching of complete tracking, bending demonstration time from the past 2-3 days to shorten to 2-3 hours.

FANUC robot sheet metal bending system using the very latest development of bending software package, through FANUC linear tracking technology to achieve robot and bending machine to follow the synchronization of action to improve the bending accuracy of the workpiece.

With the table robot according to the movement of the bending knife to hold the plate synchronous movement, to avoid the bending process due to gravity caused by the plate deformation and poor bending quality, bending robot accurately follow the bending machine bending feed speed and trajectory, greatly improve the bending accuracy and efficiency.

Through the pre-calibration of the bending coordinate system, coupled with the bending trajectory tracking function of the software package and the calculation of the compensation angle, the new Sida bending robot can automatically follow the change of the force trajectory of the bending die press fit during bending.

Compared with arc welding, spot welding and painting, the bending operation changes the shape of the workpiece, and the distance between the fixture and the bending line changes almost every time the bend is made, plus the angle and direction of each bend are different, so the robot’s path must be recalculated, and, because the workpiece is constantly deformed, the difficulty of collision avoidance is increased. In short, the bending robot’s program is very complicated, and the robot’s advantage will be greatly weakened if it is programmed manually. For small batch production, the only way out is to use software-assisted programming, so the software breakthrough is very crucial.

In summary, CNC bending robots are suitable for processing large workpieces, high volume, workpiece varieties of small enterprises, not all enterprises are suitable for robot bending, but the trend of replacing manual is irresistible.