Automatic hanging of faceplate brackets

Quick Check

Initial situation

Roto Frank Fenster- und Türtechnologie GmbH is one of the world's leading manufacturers of window and door fittings. Among other things, forend brackets are produced in Leinfelden-Echterdingen near Stuttgart. These are electroplated before they can be further installed. For transportation to the electroplating plant, the faceplate brackets are dropped from the production plant into a mesh box. The randomly stored face plates must then be removed from the mesh box and hung on an electroplating rack. This step is carried out manually and is very labor-intensive. Each faceplate bracket must be hung individually on a hook on the electroplating rack. A particular challenge here is that the hanging must be done very quickly.

Solution idea

A robot is used to hang the faceplate brackets on the galvanizing rack. An intelligent detection system can be used to remove them from the mesh box. To simplify the process, it may be necessary for the faceplate brackets to be removed from the production line by a robot and placed in the mesh box in an orderly fashion. As individual hooks on the galvanizing rack may be bent or even missing, the position of each hook must be ensured so that the faceplate bracket can be hung in a process-safe manner.

Benefit

By automatically hanging (and in future also removing) the faceplate brackets with a robot, the process handling is to become leaner and manual monotonous work is to be eliminated in future. This will increase the OEE of the production process. In addition, it is possible to reduce the amount of waste and, if necessary, packaging material if the items are placed in the transport container in an orderly manner. This would reduce the overall manufacturing costs of the faceplate angles.

The automation of labor-intensive processes such as the one described is intended to safeguard production sites in Baden-Württemberg.

Implementation of the AI application

In this quick check, various concept variants were developed and compared with each other. A wide range of options were compared, including the disorganized gripping from the mesh box (grip-in-the-box). Due to the speed required, an overall concept was finally developed that provides for the use of a magazine gripper in order to be able to hang the faceplate brackets in quick succession. The exact positioning of the faceplate angle is to be achieved by camera-based recognition of the individual hooks.