H-Bot Automation Powered by Yaskawa
Learn how Pac Tec Packaging of Janesville, WI, put H-Bot robotic automation to work in a new machine that manufactures single serve beverage brewing cups. Yaskawa servos and a Yaskawa machine controller combine with three H-bots to deliver repeatable precision and exceptional productivity for a complex packaging application.
Transcript
00:00:02 [Music] take a pod a pre injection molded pod fill it with a powder we check it place a lid on that has to snap onto a center stem ultrasonically seal that and then discharge them onto a ex bear went through metal detection and cartoning and [Music] thing that uh reduces time but also
00:01:01 takes out some of the um the inertias from making it a strict Square pattern so being able to round the corners you can begin the motion downward as you're still transversing the Escala servos themselves are smaller footprint than some of the competitors so that's a huge advantage and we use these in other applications we really love the escalas
00:01:23 for their size their strength their reliability they just made it very easy to implement this in fact we had it set up and running within perhaps an hour ycwa worked very closely with our electrical engineer for Designing these prean programs for the tuning software I'm happy with the results I'm not certain how they did it but I'm really happy with the
00:01:48 [Music] [Applause] results we do uh preformed container filling and Sealing this one was different in that the the pods don't stack together so they are a loose pack and they had to go through a feeder Bowl to be orientated and presented or normally the containers we do you would stack them and they have a
00:02:12 stacking distance so we could uh dis Dess them one at a time out of a vertical stack so that portion was completely different than what we normally do and that's where the pick and place mechanisms came in one for the the Pod one for the lid and then we also used one on the discharge because we had to flip these onto their top and send them down the conveyor on the top
00:02:34 because the bottom was a tapered small diameter and they would tip over they needed uh 30 indexes a minute so we had three lanes that was 90 pods per minute so we have essentially a 2C cycle and we need about a little less than a half a second for indexing so they gave us 1 and A2 seconds to pick the pods from the escapement and place them into the machine which sounds uh like a lot of
00:02:59 time but it it's pretty rapid because we had to move about 12 in after we picked them out of the escapement and then go downward to place them into the platin OR seat them on top of the the pot itself after it was filled there was some pretty good linear travel uh so we had to pick and then move 12 in and then downward about 6 in so we had a box pattern um in that regard yeah we had to
00:03:21 make that motion forward and back in that 1 and 1/2 seconds the choices were perhaps a robot which I think would have been prohibitively expensive Ive uh it probably would have gone as fast as we needed but it was it was an overkill for the scenario since it was doing a repetitive H pattern so we were presented the hbot and reviewed it used it on a previous project and it worked
00:03:45 out very well so we thought this was the perfect application for it well the hbot design has two separate Servo Motors that are mounted outboard on the linear axis then the belt goes between those Motors and through the z-axis so you don't have the servo motor and the actuator on the z-axis so that reduces the weight and the inertia there too so with the two Motors you have two
00:04:14 smaller Motors that work in tandem to get the linear motion and then one motor will stop and the other will move for the z-axis so it's reduced the weight it's made it quicker you have two identical Motors so you have two identical drives uh so there's a repetitiveness on the electrical design they're all the same drives and the inertia's less um they're very fast the
00:04:37 belt is very accurate the belt is much faster than a a ball screw um and the repetitiveness is just amazing very good speed too in our application we're probably running about 60% of the total speed capable of the hbot but it's plenty fast for our application and to keep the machine as compact as possible the hbot worked beautifully because it's not very wide
00:04:59 and it mounted nicely it just it was a perfect application for what we needed less power consumption less heat uh less inertia well with that linear axis uh there's a lot of um harmonics you know because of the rigidity of the machine and so on and it helped tune out those harmonics and made it very smooth um it kept the vibration of the machine to an absolute minimum it they just made it
00:05:28 very easy to implement this and in fact we had it set up and running within perhaps an hour of uh initial setup