An infeed belt conveyor in the factory of Directech QM-Systems. Under surveillance from a Cognex Corporation vision system.
The conveyor, driven by a servo motor is its speed controlled via a robot control system. The vision system at the front of the cell is linked to the robot control software which identifies where each component is on the conveyor belt. An encoder on the conveyor feeds back the position of each part.
The control software supplies both Schneider Electric picking robots with the co-ordinates of the item they are to pick. Each robot tracks the continuously moving conveyor, picking the item and placing it into the tooling on each indexing table. As each indexing table can move independently of each other, the position of each table is fed back to the robot control software, enabling the picking robots to track each system.
The vision system will identify parts that cannot be picked, i.e. if the they are deformed. These will be blown off the belt after the robot picking area into a reject bin.
