Humanoid robot provides inspection service with a smile

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, GERMANY — Everyone knows robots can improve production and quality. But no one says they can't show a little personality while they're working.

For a production cell at Fakuma in Friedrichshafen, pi4_robotics GmbH's humanoid robot takes center stage, inspecting parts made by Berlin-based injection molder Ehlebracht Plastics Technology and coated by Linköping, Sweden's Impact Coatings AB.

The partners helped create the cell, which is producing plasma vapor deposition (PVD) chrome-decorated parts

Ehlebracht Managing Director Heinrich Prinz Reuss said the company makes a number of parts that are plated after molding, but it does not have its own plating facilities.

“There are relatively few such companies in Europe providing plating services for plastic parts and as a newcomer in supplying customers with plated parts we soon realized that we can't continues this way forever, as it can mean sending parts 300 to 500 kilometers away for plating,” he said. “And then there is also the issue of traditional Chrome 6 plating no longer being considered as an ecologically accepted process these days.”

The integrated process shown at Fakuma overcomes that problem since the metallization takes place alongside the injection molding machine. And the partners — along with that smiling robot — are taking advantage of a Fakuma spotlight to stimulate interest and get feedback.

“We had a good audience already on the first day of the fair with high-quality people with high-quality functions showing interest,” he said.

The process starts with a hydraulic Engel Victory VC330/60 Ecodrive injection molding machine equipped with an Engel linear part-handling robot, which molds an ABS demonstration part bearing the names of the three partner companies in a single-cavity mold.

The tool was built by Ehlebracht's Elektra subsidiary in China.

The Engel robot places the parts on a conveyor belt. A pi4_workerbot 10.3 humanoid robot then identifies the random location of the parts on the conveyor belt with a pi4 vision system integrated in the gripper of its two arms, and places them precisely into the Plasticoat plasma treatment unit.

When they're finished there, the humanoid robot takes the parts for inspection, and packages them in a thermoformed tray.

Robot company growing

Matthias Krinke is the man behind the smiling robot.

He started pi4_robotics in 1994 “with 2,000 Deutschemarks as a one-man show in my living room, but it wasn't until 2010 that I had the first generation of humanoid robots developed.”

Now the Berlin-based company has 50 employees, and he's seeking 12 more.

The robots have been running in commercial use on a 24/7 basis for the past two years, and Krinke says his company already has a contract to supply one company with 50 humanoid robots.

He said the robot in the Ehlebracht cell is unique because of the “Inspectoid” automatic visual inspection system — “the first worldwide for inspecting chromed parts, with the Inspectoid M1 unit being absolutely new.”

The Inspectoid system is fed with 3-D data for the parts to be inspected, including complex ones, and it can accordingly check “as many angles as you want,” Krinke said, “although there is a restriction in that a very large number of angles starts to affect cycle time.”

The equipment can recognize defects down to 0.1 millimeters in up to 10 test zones for parts sized up to 150mm x 210mm x 150mm weighing a maximum 3 kilograms. The types of defects recognized include sink marks, streaking, mold errors, blisters, pores, burning in terms of molding quality, as well as perforation, flaking, stains and chrome specks in terms of the plated quality. Otherwise, it can also detect missing parts, scratches, cracks, other faults and contamination.

Krinke said the humanoid handling system can be scaled up to handle a large number of parts, for example from multicavity molds, through use of multiple grippers. The robots can also be leased, and changeover from fully automatic to manual operation takes no longer than 10 minutes.

Peter Högfeldt, marketing manager at Impact Coatings AB, described the company's process as “lean PVD vacuum metallization, something that makes us different from others.

“There is feedback on a finished part within minutes,” he said. “It can take weeks with conventional production and by then you may have lost 20,000 parts — so it reduce scrap costs considerably.”

It is also lean because lead times can be reduced and products can be shipped the same day as production starts up, Högfeldt added.

In Germany, Ehlebracht has 32 injection molding machines with 20-300 tonnes clamping force in Enger, another 19 in Berlin with 100-1,300 tonnes clamping force. Elsewhere, there are 29 machines of 30-550 tonnes in Michalovce, Slovakia, and 70 with 40-1,000 tonnes in the Shenzhen and Suzhou plants in China.

The company reported 2013 sales of 82.1 million euros for the plastics technology and Elektra lighting systems business units. The plastics technology group has 1,006 employees