first time robot tending, what caused the most real downtime for you?

[ZanzaBionis]

I’ve been watching more robot tending videos lately and it always looks smooth until I remember real shops are messy. I’m seriously considering a simple robot setup for one repeat job, but I keep hearing the same warning that the robot is not the hard part, it’s everything around it.

For the folks who actually integrated a robot, what caused the most downtime in real life. Was it fixturing that was not as repeatable as you thought, grippers not liking part variation, vision being finicky, or cycle timing and handshakes being a pain. If you could redo one thing from day one to avoid headaches, what would it be.

 

[Captain_Goofy]

Handshakes and timing caused the most pain for us. Door timing, chuck timing, cycle ready signals, all that boring stuff adds up and it is where you lose hours. Day one redo would be mapping every signal and failure mode before we ever ran parts.

 

[Alan]

If you could redo day one of robot tending, what would you overbuild first. Part presentation, hard stops and datums, probing, or a better way to keep chips out of the nest. Also what controller and CNC were you integrating, since the handshake pain varies a lot.