Just the tool for the job
Just the tool for the job
The theme for this issue is the plastics industry and we normally aim to include a mixture of research papers and application oriented features that cover the theme subject area, as well as non-theme material. However, in this case I was not able to locate any academic institutions that were involved in this area, so our research articles are non-theme material (and excellent by the way).
There are plenty of organisations involved in plastics research but they all just use robots as tools and do not see the required application work as part of their research endeavours.
"… just use robots as tools?" Excellent news! That is what robots should be, what they were always designed to be, and hopefully what they will always remain.
What this says about their application within the plastics industry is that they are well up to the required tasks and that companies considering using them need have few fears.
If you have ever watched an injection moulding machine going through its slow repetitive cycle, opening and closing, with de-gated products falling haphazardly down into a shoot below, with a normally bored operator standing by with half-an-eye on the integrity of each piece; then you will probably have considered that there must be a better way.
Robots can be synchronised with the opening of the mould and can grasp the part(s) as they are released so that they are spared the potentially damaging fall, and with orientation maintained, can be presented to a variety of inspection systems that can confirm their quality and completeness. As with many robot tasks, it is not that they can do the job better than a human operator,but that they can do it as well as the operator and with a consistency that even the most conscientious operator would find impossible to achieve. The robot's presence also removes the operator from the unpleasant and potentially dangerous proximity of the injection moulding machine.
Inconsistency is the enemy of automated production and so anything that can help remove cycle variations has to be a good thing. Another benefit of using robots in this area is that the demands in terms of precision and speed of operation are quite low by today's standards and this means that the robots themselves can be relatively inexpensive.
In this issue we have examples of the use of robots for unloading injection moulding machines, and two advanced methods for using robots for cleaning the moulds both on and off line. These show that their use is well proven, and yet the application of robots in this area seems to depend largely on national boundaries. If you are one of those countries that has adopted them widely then you will probably not be giving them a second thought, however, if you are not,then perhaps you should.
Clive Loughlin
