Bin Picking technology
in electromagnetic brake manufacturing

Our customer: ARGO - HYTOS s.r.o.

As a global supplier of hydraulic system solutions, the ARGO-HYTOS Group plays an important role in the global supply chain for mobile machinery and general engineering.
ARGO-HYTOS has manufacturing companies in Germany, the Czech Republic, India, China, Poland, Brazil and the USA and is represented by numerous international sales companies worldwide. Our major customer is ARGO - HYTOS s.r.o., based in Vrchlabí, Czech Republic.

Project assignment

Our task was to design a solution for automatic selection of semi-finished products (valve bodies) from a transport box (as the customer takes it over from the supplier's logistics) and to subsequently distribute individual valve bodies to three technologically independent machine tools for different stages of further processing using Bin-Picking technology.

The robotic workplace also provides the following activities:

  • Selection of a non-oriented blank from three different sized boxes (called scenes in Bin-Picking terminology), where each scene can contain up to four different packs of blanks.
  • Transport of the semi-finished product to the designated machine tool in the required orientation and at the desired cycle time.

Project description

The workstation is equipped with a FANUC robot and a Bin-Picking scanning portal that is the same for each scene. Data from the Bin-Picking system is sent to the robot, which uses the data to pick the part from the designated box and place it in the transport position. The tables for repositioning any selected part and the 2D camera are used to position the part in the correct spatial orientation. The individual semi-finished products are placed by the robot into a pneumatic lift with a height difference of 2.5m, from where they are then transported by conveyor to the specific machine tool.

The robotic workplace is fenced with a system from TROAX with service penetrations connected to the safety system.

To control the entire workplace, including safety, according to the Blumenbecker standard, a Siemens 1500F series control system with ET200SP IO units is used. The workstation is designed as unattended, for visualization and control of the workstation in service mode is used touch control panel Siemens TP series 1200. The workstation is also remotely monitored without the need to use the customer's IT infrastructure. In the event of non-standard behaviour, the Blumenbecker service team is immediately notified and can start working to resolve the situation.

At the customer's request, the entire workstation is designed as modular and allows for future addition of additional scenes to the existing configuration.