Last Friday, Mr. Li of an auto parts factory in Guangdong personally sent a banner. The golden words "Black technology for packing, solving ten years of pain" on the red silk cloth made people''s eyes shine. As a technician who participated in this project throughout the whole process, I clearly remember the dilemma of their workshop at the beginning-the tail end of the assembly line was full of strange-shaped steering knuckles and bracket parts, and five or six workers were busy adjusting the placement angle, but the packaging box was still crooked. Now, watching the monitoring screen, the intelligent packaging system for special-shaped parts stacks parts accurately like building blocks. Even the old master who has worked in the factory for 20 years can''t help but mutter: "This robot hand is more skillful than a human!"
When "irregularity" collides with "standardization"
The biggest headache for the automotive parts industry is the packaging of special-shaped parts. Those castings with curved surfaces, multiple holes, and asymmetry are like a group of disobedient children when placed on the conveyor belt. Mr. Li and his team tried traditional robot packaging, but the result was that either the coating of the parts was pinched or they were placed in the box and bumped against each other. 10% of the goods were always returned when transported to the main engine factory.
The engineers of our factory squatted on the site for three days and found that the crux of the problem lies in the continuity of "grab, look, and place". The traditional system can only handle parts with fixed postures, and it is at a loss when encountering special-shaped parts. After returning, we changed the plan overnight and equipped the robot with our self-developed flexible grasping system. This is not an ordinary rubber suction cup, but an "octopus tentacle" that can automatically deform according to the contour of the part. Combined with three-dimensional visual positioning, no matter whether the part is lying, sideways or upside down, it will be straightened for you before packing.
Equip the robot with "perspective eyes + cotton hands"
The engine brackets exported to Germany last month really made the intelligent packing system for special-shaped parts show its prowess. The surface of this batch of parts is full of heat dissipation holes. The customer requires that the holes must be facing up when packing, and each box must be packed in three layers with 12 pieces. In the past, this required a special mold to customize the buffer tray, and the packaging cost alone would eat up most of the profit.
Now our system starts 3D scanning, generates a part point cloud model in 0.5 seconds, and the robot automatically avoids the vulnerable area of the hole when grabbing. What''s even more amazing is the dynamic path planning function. The 12 parts in the box automatically calculate the optimal arrangement and combination, which is more compact than the manual arrangement of the master craftsman. Mr. Li gestured with the shipping sample: "It used to take 3 minutes to pack a box, but now it''s done in 45 seconds. The box was dropped three times during the transportation test, and there was not even a scratch on the parts!"
Cross-border conquest from automobile factory to toy factory
The ability of this special-shaped parts intelligent packing system is not only in the automobile industry. In the past, the automation rate of the faucet packaging line of a bathroom factory in Zhejiang was always stuck at a bottleneck of 60% due to the different shapes of faucets. After we added the visual positioning module to their production line, now even the most fancy antique faucets can be accurately grasped, and the packaging efficiency has doubled directly.
The most interesting case is a toy factory in Shenzhen. The Transformers joint parts they produce have all kinds of strange shapes, and the cost of manual sorting remains high. After we adjusted the pressure parameters of the grasping system, now even the thumb-sized gear parts can be gently grasped. The factory manager joked: "This system should be renamed ''Transformers Guardian''!"
The "realistic philosophy" behind intelligent packing
Mr. Zhou in the R&D department has a catchphrase: "A slight difference can lead to a thousand miles of loss." This is vividly reflected in the special-shaped parts intelligent packing project. To test the stability of the system, we used 2,000 samples of different sizes for violent testing - deliberately throwing parts on the conveyor belt to see if the robot can accurately grasp them in a crooked state. Xiao Wang from the debugging team slept in the workshop for three weeks and finally raised the grasping success rate from 87% to 99.5%.
Now when you walk into the display area of our factory, you can see a special device: transparent boxes are filled with car suspension parts, ceramic teapots, and Lego blocks, all of which are mixed by the special-shaped parts intelligent packing system. This "assorted packaging box" is not only a confidence in technology, but also a declaration to the industry: in the field of intelligent packaging, there are no "unpackable" parts, only "unthinkable" solutions.
The next time those "disobedient" special-shaped parts in your workshop are in a bad mood, you might as well take a look at our intelligent system that can "coax parts" - after all, letting each part find the most comfortable "seat" is the most proud skill of our packaging machine factory.
