Manufacturer of Measuring Devices:

A manufacturer of measuring devices needed a method to automatically apply components to a sub assembly of the finished product. The main benefit the customer wanted was to improve quality and increase production. The parts had to be placed onto the assembly to an accuracy of 0.003 inches or better. A robot was used to remove a part from a tray and place it onto a backlight. A camera on the vision guided robot acquired an image of the part to determine its rough location and orientation.

Next, the robot was used to pick up the part relative to the location found in the image and move it above an upwardly pointed camera with special LED lighting. Using small fiducials on the part, the image from the second camera calculated the precise location of the gage on the robot’s end effector. Based on the location calculated from the image, the robot placed the part onto the assembly. An operator was then used to remove the completed part from the workcell. The cycle time is 3.5 seconds/assembly.