Composite Robot CNC Product Loading and Unloading
Overview
The traditional CNC industry primarily relies on manual handling for product loading and unloading, facing the following core pain points:
High labor and equipment maintenance costs: Skilled technicians are difficult to recruit and prone to high turnover, with companies spending millions annually on loading and unloading processes.
Human resource shortage: Repetitive labor involves high intensity, leading to worker fatigue and potential safety hazards.
Insufficient production efficiency and precision: Manual clamping and positioning errors typically range from 0.5 to 1 mm, leading to persistently high product defect rates; the loading and unloading process can even account for 30%-50% of the total production cycle.
Low level of factory automation and intelligence: Traditional dedicated machines or fixed robotic arms are difficult to retrofit and require long changeover times, making it hard to quickly respond to the market demand for "multiple varieties and small batches.".
To address the aforementioned issues, Fuwei Intelligent's compound robot integrates the dual advantages of mobile robots (AGV/AMR) and collaborative robots, achieving coordinated operation of "hands, feet, eyes, and brain," making it a key solution for overcoming the challenges of CNC loading and unloading.
Technical challenges
The factory environment is complex, with many abnormal ground conditions and significant changes in on-site lighting
The workshop floor may have iron filings, oil stains, and unstable lighting conditions, posing challenges to the stable operation and visual recognition of robots.
The product has high grasping accuracy, with an accuracy requirement of within 1mm
The processing of precision components requires the robot to control the positioning error of each grasping and placement within 1mm. Traditional AGV chassis has weak stiffness, which can easily cause deformation when the robotic arm moves.
The product requires a fast loading and unloading cycle, with a single loading and unloading time of less than 20 seconds
The production line has a fast pace, requiring robots to quickly complete material retrieval, feeding, loading and unloading actions, avoiding machine waiting and improving overall production efficiency.
Composite robots need to achieve loading and unloading of multiple CNC devices
A single robot needs to cover multiple machine tools (usually 4-20), with flexible layout and fast turnover speed.
Composite robots need to cooperate with CNC machine tools and hidden lifting robots to achieve collaborative operations
The production process involves multiple stages such as material grabbing, processing, testing, and cleaning, requiring a unified information exchange platform to achieve seamless integration and collaborative scheduling between equipment.
Solution
The product identification and positioning are achieved using a 2.5D high-precision camera with anti-interference capabilities
FUWEI Intelligence's self-developed 2.5D vision system, combining 3D point cloud registration and image multi-feature localization technology, ensures stable recognition even in complex lighting and reflective metal surface scenarios.
The visual system captures real-time features of the lathe chuck or materials, achieving sub-pixel-level precision alignment correction.
Employing a self-developed high-precision 2.5D vision algorithm, the positioning accuracy can reach ±0.5mm
Deep learning-based visual algorithms can quickly identify scattered workpieces and adjust the robot's grasping path in real time through coordinate transformation, ensuring precise and error-free clamping each time.
Adopting self-developed 2.5D hand-eye calibration, the conventional calibration accuracy can reach ±0.2mm, with a maximum precision of ±0.05mm
By employing a high-precision hand-eye calibration algorithm, the visual system is accurately aligned with the end-effector coordinate system of the robotic arm, providing a fundamental guarantee for high-precision grasping.
Optimize the grasping action of the composite robot, with a single pick-and-place cycle time of 15-18 seconds for the product
The coordinated control of the mobile chassis, collaborative arm, and vision system is achieved through an integrated controller (such as the ICD core controller), eliminating communication delays among multiple systems and improving task response speed by a factor of 20.
The composite robot employs laser SLAM navigation technology, ensuring a parking positioning accuracy of ±5mm
Adopting rail-free laser SLAM navigation and integrating multiple sensors such as 3D obstacle avoidance cameras, the system achieves autonomous path planning and precise docking, adapting to the complex environment of the workshop.
Adopting automatic charging technology to meet the demand for 24-hour uninterrupted production
The robot can automatically recharge when its battery level falls below the set threshold or when idle, requiring no manual intervention, thus achieving truly round-the-clock unmanned production.
Core Values
Improve production efficiency: The automated loading and unloading system reduces manual operations, shortens production cycles, and a single composite robot can cover the entire material flow of 12 CNC machine tools.
Reduce labor costs: Reduce reliance on labor, decrease labor costs and intensity, and improve employee job satisfaction.
Ensure product quality: high-precision positioning and stable grasping ability, ensure the stability and safety of materials during the production process, and reduce the defect rate.
Flexibility and Scalability: Supports dynamic increase or decrease in the number of robots, rapid production changes, and adapts to the flexible production needs of "multiple varieties and small batches".
Relevant cases
