Using Robot Manipulators on High Efficient Wrapping Machines for the Paper Industry

J. Norberto Pires *Paulo Monteiro **

Volker Shöelzke ***

* University of Coimbra (Portugal), ** ABB Robotics (Portugal), *** Voith Paper (Germany)

For more information or to download this presentation:http://robotics.dem.uc.pt/norberto/isr01/

http://robotics.dem.uc.pt/norberto/

AbstractIn this paper a remote software environment developed to monitor and control robotic manufacturing cells is presented and discussed. It was used with an industrial system developed to wrap, label and assist storing of paper rolls coming from high efficient paper machines. The system is briefly introduced stressing out its main advantages. Special attention is taken to the software architecture used to develop the remote services available from the system: Services for system monitoring; Services for system maintenance; Services for file and database handling; Services for production monitoring; Services for operator interface and system parameterization from system control panel. The paper discusses also the advantages of these types of distributed and object-oriented software approaches, using some inside from the presented implementation. Finally, we briefly discuss the application of electronic messaging services to this type of systems, introducing the application EmailWare.

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In this station each roll is measured and weighted automatically and autonomously. The obtained values are introduced into the production

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wrapping machine assisted by two industrial robots ABB IRB6400 S4 C plus). The robots are commanded to pick 2 headers, one per robot, of appropriate dimensions (there are 6 piles of different headers available) and hold them against the two bases of the roll. Synchronization and messaging (including error handling) with station PLC, which also handles the wrapping machine, is done by Profibus using a simple IO protocol. The system is able to wrap rolls in cycles of less than 20 seconds.

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n 1 External headers are applied on the rolls to finish the roll wrapping process and hold the wrapping paper. Operation is assisted using one industrial robot (ABB IRB6400 S4 C plus). The robot is commanded to pick two headers (gripper holds two headers) and put them on the plates of a heated press that will glue them to the rolls just by pressing them from side to side. Due to the cycle time demands (less than 20 seconds per roll), robots receive dimensions of the actual roll to pick the appropriate header (like in the previous station) but also the position of the press plates (these plates pre-position in function of roll length to speed up the process).

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n 1 In this station two labels are applied to

the wrapped rolls (one on top and the other on the right side), with information about the roll (dimensions, weight, customer, production date, etc.). Each label has a code bar that will be used by the automatic warehouse to process the roll. Labels are printed by an office laser printer, and outputted to a small ramp. The robot picks the labels, when commanded to do it, waits for roll in position, puts glue on labels using a glue machine and after receiving “glue labels” command, and puts labels on roll when commanded to do it. After each basic operation, execution status is checked and the next operation is only commanded if success on previous one was obtained. On error states, current process is aborted and the error is issued back to the commanding machine (in this case a PLC). This same procedure is used in any station. All commands are acknowledged when they complete.

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We built another version of this station for other paper machine, at the same company, that uses Ethernet communications and a PC to interface with the production database. The PC is also used to command the station, using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) made to the robot controller [4,5].

ProductionSoftware

Server

Robot

UNIX Station

PC ServerSock CMD

RPC CMD

Event

Event

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Answer

Overview diagram

Control Panel

Software Architecture

ActiveXRobot

CommunicationObject

ActiveXForce/TorqueSensor Object

DDE CallbackFunction

DDE Services

DDE ClientApplications

DDE

OLE

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DDE Server

ActiveXRobot

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ActiveXForce/TorqueSensor Object

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Programs RAPIDAplication

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Software Architecture: Implementation

EmailWareA tool for e-Manufacturing.

IF poll_nowPoll_Robots

Check for

emails

Processcommands

MessageQueue

Processmessage

(poll_now = 1)

SMTPservice

POP3service

E-mailServer

Log file

RPCServer

RPCMessage

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Retrieve commands

Send

Retrieve

EMAILWARE

E-mail alertsLogs and errorsSystem StatusInformation

Kusiak, A, “Computational Intelligence in Design and Manufacturing”, John Wiley & Sons, 2000.Pires JN, Sá da Costa JMG, “Object Oriented and Distributed Approach for Programming Robotic Manufacturing Cells”, IFAC Journal on Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing, February 2000.Pires, JN, “Object-oriented and distributed programming of robotic and automation equipment”, Industrial Robot, An International Journal, MCB University Press, July 2000.Bloomer J., "Power Programming with RPC", O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1992.Halsall F., "Data Communications, Computer Networks and Open Systems", Third Edition, Addison-Wesley, 1992.RAP, Service Protocol Definition, ABB Flexible Automation, 1996.Pires, JN, “EmailWare: A tool for e-manufacturing”, Assembly Automation Journal, MCB University Press, Oxford, May 2001.Box D., "Essential COM", Addison-Wesley, 1998Rogerson D., "Inside COM", Microsoft Press, 1997.Pires JN, “Interfacing Robotic and Automation Equipment with Matlab”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, September 2000.

References