A manufacturer of shock absorber technology was looking for an efficient and reliable solution to automatically feed industrial shock absorbers to a robot cell. The shock absorbers are contained in small load carriers (SLCs) weighing around 20 kg. The aim was to feed these SLCs to the processing cell in cycles, securely fix them there and make them available in indexed form. After processing, the shock absorbers should be placed back into the SLCs and removed manually at a workstation. As processing in the robot cell can take up to an hour, a buffer function was also required to store several SLCs.
A combined conveying path consisting of a drive roller conveyor and a gravity roller conveyor was used. The SLCs are placed manually on the RBM-P 2255 drive roller conveyor. The conveyor is moved precisely by a Poly-V belt drive. As soon as the robot cell is free, the SLC is automatically fed and positioned in an integrated fixing and indexing station.
Inside the cell, an industrial robot removes the shock absorber and transfers it for automated processing. A processed shock absorber is then placed back in the SLC. The SLC is then conveyed by an RBS-P 2255 gravity roller conveyor with end stop for manual removal. The roller conveyor also acts as a buffer section and can buffer up to four SLCs, which enables decoupled processing despite the long cycle times.
All conveyor components are fitted with covers to protect the operating personnel.
> RBM-P 2255 drive roller conveyor
> RBS-P 2255 gravity roller conveyor
> Guarding