Flex­i­ble robotic debur­ring cell for sur­face pro­cess­ing of vary­ing, com­plex components

To imple­ment the debur­ring appli­ca­tion for their geo­met­ri­cally com­plex parts, Greene Tweed used ArtiMinds RPS robot pro­gram­ming soft­ware. The intu­itive soft­ware, ArtiMinds RPS, gives the user an open plat­form to eas­ily design and imple­ment new robot pro­grams. With it, users can pre­pare pro­grams offline, set up the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between off-the-shelf automa­tion equip­ment, inte­grate log­i­cal con­di­tions, and val­i­date pro­grams through sim­u­la­tions before they are trans­ferred on the real sys­tem. The coach­ing and sup­port ArtiMinds pro­vided Greene Tweed short­ened their devel­op­ment time­line and gave them a soft­ware frame­work to grow into. 

Andrew Laich shared that, “Artiminds RPS allowed us to eas­ily cre­ate com­plex motion paths that could be used between mul­ti­ple mate­r­ial removal tools, as well as sim­pli­fy­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the robot and PLC, and HMI to cycle through dif­fer­ent tool­ing in the cell. In my expe­ri­ence there is no com­pa­ra­ble soft­ware solu­tion avail­able in the market.” 

Once deployed, the updated robotic mate­r­ial removal cell more than halved the over­all pro­cess­ing time for Greene Tweed’s parts and elim­i­nated all but the most minor post-process fin­ish­ing by hand. Thanks to the close and suc­cess­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion, Greene Tweed was able to sig­nif­i­cantly reduce their time­line to develop and deploy a fully auto­mated debur­ring cell. Choos­ing the right part­ners enabled the Greene Tweed team to build a pro­gram for their cell that meets their needs exactly.