Acrylic Sanding Cobot

The Challenge

Our client must sand their product to remove machining marks as part of their preparation process. Before the installation of the cobot, employees used handheld tools to carry out the task. Although a highly skilled job, there was potential for variations to occur due to wear in grits, varying forces applied and also the chance of RSI. Therefore, the main challenge was removing all these issues by utilising a cobot.

The requirements of the machine were as follows:

• A simple to program system with automatic grit change
• A system that could easily move to other manufacturing areas
• A system that could reach over a 1300mm envelope to allow for multiple parts to be set up
• A system that could provide force feedback to ensure consistent sanding

The Solution

The client requested an on-site visit to demonstrate the cobot to see how it would work with their sanding process. The client selected a variety of acrylic products for the demonstration.

Within a short space of time, our engineer had the cobot out of the box and set up on the client’s workbench; after attaching the OnRobot sanding tool, our engineer walked the client through the process of programming the cobot to carry out the sanding process. This was a demonstration, and the programme would need to be tweaked once the cobot was in place; however, this gave the client an overview of what the cobot could do.

The client was so happy with the demonstration that they purchased a Universal Robots’ UR5e cobot and the OnRobot sanding kit.

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