Robot Maintenance and Recovery

Manufacturers today rely more and more on Industrial Robots for efficiency and quality.  Robots used for welding, cutting, material handling, dispensing, and assembly must operate at very high levels of reliability and repeatability/accuracy to meet the demands of modern manufacturing.  This means that any mechanical failure of the robot system - whether the robot itself or any of its peripherals - can result in many hours of lost production or can generate large amounts of scrap parts.

In most of these robotic applications, the Tool Center Point (TCP) and Joint Mastering (Zeroing) must be maintained to very strict tolerances.  Therefore, if the robotic tooling becomes bent, or if the robot joints crash, the recovery process can be very time consuming and costly to the manufacturer.

The term Maintenance refers to the application consisting of resetting (or Maintaining) a Robot Cell back to its original “condition” in terms of Calibration Parameters after, for example, the Robot and/or End-Effector has “crashed”, a Robot motor or linkage mechanism was replaced, etc.; in other words, when any one of the Calibration Parameters of the Robot, the End Effector, and/or the Fixture might have changed!

Dynalog offers several solutions to provide the manufacturer with fast and accurate recovery of their robotic system.  DynaCal is an Absolute Accuracy recovery of the entire robot, TCP and Fixture alignment, which is performed off-line.  AutoCal is a TCP recovery system that is an automated and “in-line” system.

Also see:
>Case Studies>No Manual "touch up" with DynaCal at Ford - Genk
>Case Studies>Integrated OLP process at JCI using DynaCal
For Off-Line Maintenance and Recovery >Products>DynaCal
For In-Line, Automatic Recovery >Products>AutoCal