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ROBOT-BASED ASSEM­BLY OF STRETCH­ERS – pro­grammed with ARTIMINDS RPS

Siemens Health­i­neers

Another soft­ware foun­da­tion for the site in Kemnath

THE CHAL­LENGE

Siemens Kem­nath pro­duces stretch­ers, among other things. Stretch­ers are used to insert patients into the imag­ing sys­tems of the Siemens Health­i­neers prod­ucts. For this, the stretch­ers are moved hor­i­zon­tally on a lin­ear axis. Until now, the assem­bly of those axes was mostly done in a man­ual process which included 280 screws to be set per stretcher in total. “The work was partly done over­head or while bent over, because the screws have to be fed from below as well as from above”, states Flo­rian Beer, Project Man­ager for Robotics and Automa­tion. The com­po­nent is often rotated and turned dur­ing assem­bly. “The work sit­u­a­tion for our employ­ees was very uncom­fort­able, but a robot does not really care about that”, tells Beer with a wink. The robot not only relieves the employ­ees, but it also ensures process reli­a­bil­ity: the robot repro­duces the process 100 per­cent iden­ti­cally every time.

ArtiMinds Robotics - robot-based assembly at Siemens Healthineers
Siemens Health­i­neers

A robotic cell equipped with a light­weight robot and a spe­cial screw­driv­ing sys­tem han­dles the man­u­fac­tur­ing process. “The solu­tion works so far, but is still strongly lim­ited in some areas”, crit­i­cizes the project man­ager. “We have issues with the data trans­fer for exam­ple, espe­cially with the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between robot and screw­driv­ing sys­tem, since the robot used acts as mas­ter but does not speak PROFINET.” A deficit that could only be solved via dig­i­tal I/Os. This makes the struc­ture inflex­i­ble. Chang­ing the used robot man­u­fac­turer would come with a con­sid­er­able amount of addi­tional expenses.
In addi­tion, there is a lack of gran­u­lar­ity in the pro­gram­ming of the indi­vid­ual machines: The lack of inter­me­di­ate steps and sub­pro­grams makes it dif­fi­cult to clearly struc­ture the over­all process. There are cases of emer­gency where the pro­duc­tion has to be inter­rupted. If that hap­pens, the pos­si­bil­i­ties to con­tinue the man­u­fac­tur­ing process at the cor­rect pro­cess­ing step or to jump to the cor­rect posi­tion in the pro­gram are very lim­ited. There­fore it is planned to imple­ment a mas­ter PLC into the cur­rent process.

THE SOLU­TION

The Robot Pro­gram­ming Suite with the ArTIA con­nec­tor con­nects the robot and SIMATIC PLC

That is why the project man­ager decided to recast the soft­ware foun­da­tion using ArtiMinds. “Two worlds col­lide in our work”, says Beer, explain­ing the pilot idea. “On the one hand, that of the robot and on the other, that of the pro­gram­ma­ble logic con­troller, the PLC. With this project, we wanted to merge both.” For that, the team car­ried out two fun­da­men­tal reori­en­ta­tions: In the first step, they trans­ferred the con­trol of the plant com­po­nents to a cen­tral PLC. After­wards, the depart­ment uni­fied the robot pro­gram­ming by using a sin­gle soft­ware: The ArtiMinds Robot Pro­gram­ming Suite (RPS).
Includ­ing a spe­cial fea­ture: The inter­face pro­gram­ming between robot con­troller and SIMATIC PLC is per­formed auto­mat­i­cally by the so called ArTIA con­nec­tor, devel­oped by ArtiMinds.
“I am not aware of any alter­na­tive tool that can merge con­trol tech­nol­ogy and robotics in this way,” sum­ma­rizes Beer.

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WHY ARTIMINDS?

“ArtiMinds RPS struc­tures indi­vid­ual pro­gram steps gran­u­larly, which makes indi­vid­ual assem­bly processes eas­ier to under­stand and the search for errors much simpler.”

Flo­rian Beer, Project Man­ager for Robotic and Automa­tion at Siemens Healthineers

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THE ADVAN­TAGES

User-friendly han­dling

Beer is highly sat­is­fied with the choice: “ArtiMinds RPS speaks with almost any robot. So even if the man­u­fac­tur­ers vary, we do not have to start from zero and learn the pro­gram­ming respec­tively the pro­gram­ming lan­guages again.” The soft­ware also auto­mat­i­cally struc­tures the gen­er­ated robot pro­gram con­gru­ently to the process steps. If nec­es­sary, the gran­u­lar­ity can then be fur­ther increased so that indi­vid­ual assem­bly processes are more com­pre­hen­si­ble and the search for errors becomes much easier.
A big plus for Beer is the user-friendly han­dling of the soft­ware: “ArtiMinds RPS is very intu­itively designed. With a two-day train­ing and a lit­tle famil­iar­iza­tion, using RPS any­one can pro­gram a robot within a few days. Pro­gram­ming knowl­edge is not required.” As robotics experts are rare on the mar­ket, this advan­tage makes the soft­ware so attrac­tive to Beer. The depart­ment also reg­u­larly works with stu­dents who ini­tially lack the appro­pri­ate robotics exper­tise. This means that junior col­leagues can also quickly pro­gram and opti­mize robot cells using drag-and-drop, and long train­ing peri­ods are a thing of the past.
The pilot phase started in July 2021. Only eight months passed from con­cep­tion to imple­men­ta­tion to test­ing. Beer´s ini­tial inter­me­di­ate con­clu­sion: “We see a clear addi­tional value in the pro­gram­ming of our equip­ment. That is why we decided to take the pilot project from ‘proof of con­cept’ to ser­ial production.”
In addi­tion to the prod­uct itself, Flo­rian Beer is also impressed by the sup­port he receives from ArtiMinds. “In every pilot project, prob­lems arise that were not antic­i­pated. Then we sim­ply made a quick call and worked together to find a solu­tion. The coop­er­a­tion was excel­lent”, he finally summarizes.

 

ArtiMinds-Robotics-customer-Siemens-robotbased-assembly

“ArtiMinds RPS is designed to be very intu­itive. With the two-day train­ing and a lit­tle famil­iar­iza­tion, any­one can pro­gram a robot within a few days. Pro­gram­ming knowl­edge is not required.”

Flo­rian Beer, Project Man­ager for Robotic and Automa­tion at Siemens Healthineers

Take Aways of Siemens Health­i­neers when using ArtiMinds RPS:

  • The graph­i­cal, intu­itive user inter­face and pre-pro­grammed func­tion tem­plates make it pos­si­ble to solve com­plex automa­tion tasks even with lit­tle or no pro­gram­ming knowledge.
  • Fast and easy pro­gram­ming of PLC-con­trolled assem­bly processes.
  • ArtiMinds Robot Pro­gram­ming Suite and the ArTIA Con­nec­tor pro­vide a cou­pling of robot and PLC.
  • Uner­gonomic work that has to be done over­head or bent over is now car­ried out by a robot.
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ArtiMinds Robotics - Easy programming of robots for assembly process
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