Quick Pick

摘要

Grundfos, a Danish manufacturer of water pumps, used manual labor for many years to unload bins of rotor cans. For the past 15 years, the company has pursued robotic automation to improve productivity. Within the first 10 years of this effort, Grundfos succeeded in automating many simple manual tasks, but complex robotic workcells, such as picking from unstructured bins, continued to prove too difficult until recently.rnAccording to Grundfos senior engineer Michael R.0ddik, the company has now implemented its second robotic bin-picking workcell in partnership with Scape Technologies, achieving 98.3% uptime and cycle times 20% better than expected. The work-cell picks rotor cans-which seal the rotor in the pump housing-from a bin containing eight individual layers. A pair of cameras mounted to a tower provides the system with a rough location of the parts, while a robot-mounted camera provides images to fine-tune robotic movements.