10181 Part Handling heavy parts dual machine top loading 7th Axis

Initial situation

Bruderer Stanzautomaten, a Swiss company with around 500 employees, is a leading manufacturer of high-speed automatic punching presses. Quality, precision and performance are the three factors that make Bruderer products so successful.

Bruderer has a very high level of vertical integration. Independence, flexibility and responsiveness are the results of this strategy.

Problem

However, manually loading heavy workpieces into the machine tools is time-consuming and cost-intensive. The valuable, rare skilled workers could be better deployed, and there is significant potential for optimising machine utilisation. Machine downtime overnight and at weekends should be avoided in modern production. Having realised this, Roger Müller, Head of Production at Bruderer, set out to find an automation specialist who could master the special challenges.

Goals and requirements

Manual loading and unloading is to be automated so that employees can devote themselves to more important and higher-value tasks. Autonomy should be high enough to allow unmanned night and weekend shifts.

Solution

He found what he was looking for at Roth Technik, a local automation specialist.

"Roth Technik not only impressed us with its outstanding concept. In Roth Technik, we found an automation expert who understands our challenges, can respond flexibly to our wishes and is there for us. This is a partnership we can rely on."

-Roger Müller, Head of Production at Bruderer

"Our goal is always to find the most coherent solution for our customers' diverse automation tasks. The requirements in terms of process, footprint, operation, flexibility, autonomy, maintenance, changeover times, etc. must be taken into account and perfectly harmonised."

-Markus Roth, CEO Roth Technik

Roth Technik solves this task with an articulated arm robot from Fanuc with a payload of 360kg. This robot travels on a specially developed and built 7th axis, a so-called robot rail with a travel distance of 18 metres. This means that workpieces weighing up to 280 kg can be loaded fully automatically into two turn-mill centres with just one robot. Thanks to the top loading approach, in which the robot enters the machine from above, the two machines remain freely accessible so that employees can monitor and follow the process at all times. In addition, no cooling lubricant is carried away in front of the machine. Thanks to this design, the footprint of the system is minimised and valuable, scarce factory space is saved. The safety of employees is guaranteed thanks to safe workspace monitoring of the robot and the "safe gripping" developed by Roth Technik. The robot is operated via two large, intuitively designed HMIs, on which the entire process is parameterised. Robot programming skills are not required.

Result/outcome

The result is impressive:

The CNC machines now not only produce without employee involvement, but also run fully automatically at night and at weekends thanks to their high level of autonomy. As a result, the production hours now amount to over 5000 hours per year instead of the previous 2000, which corresponds to a significant increase in productivity of 250%.

"Thanks to the increase in efficiency, we were also able to win new orders and thus further improve our capacity utilisation."

-Roger Müller

In addition, employees have been relieved of monotonous work and can now devote themselves to more exciting activities.

"A project is successful for us when it makes our customers even more successful"

-Markus Roth

Clever automation - sustainable production