Robotic Blogs

Automated assembly lines have come a long way from the days of heaving metal in Mr. Ford’s concept factories. Industrial robots, after a boom in the 80s, are becoming increasingly faster and stronger to match the high-rise demands in production capacity.





Just in March 2006, Fatronik unveiled the fastest industrial handling robot in the world at the time named Quickplacer [1]. Fatronik is a Spain-based R&D company with technological expertise in manufacturing production.





Watching Quickplacer at work is like watching a magician on stage. It is capable of handling items of up to 2Kg at a stunning rate of 200 items per minute. It can be further integrated with vision camera for movement guidance in accordance with the shape and orientation of the objects and also the speed of conveyor belts.





This parallel robotic platform has an effector that is manipulated by 4 precision actuators that can control four degrees of freedom( 3 translational and 1 rotational along the vertical axis). Its high speed is characterized by dynamic acceleration of 15G and a braking capacity that is more than 5 times greater than a Formula 1 racecar. Even in high speed motion, the robot can still maintain an absolute positional accuracy of +/- 0.2mm [2].

An optimized path planning is developed for an efficient movement and to avoid discontinuities in acceleration.


This robot is designed for small mass handling industries such as food processing (e.g. candy packaging), electronics components, and pharmaceutical products.



Eugene Peng
NT061399W



References

[1] Fatronik News Release:

http://www.fatronik.com/en/noticia.php?id=53

[2] Quickplacer technical characteristics:
http://www.fatronik.com/documentos/proyectos/Characteristics.pdf