The realisation of complete turnkey plants requires a high level of expertise and experience for the individual process steps. Hirata Engineering Europe has also implemented these requirements in the latest example of an automation plant for a supplier of electronic components for the automotive industry. A modular system with six processing stations was designed in which a wide variety of processes, such as dosing of heat conductive adhesive, feeding of PCBs, screwing, testing, labelling, various handling tasks and depalletising are accommodated in a space-saving system layout. Constricted space and the shortest possible delivery times are once again the main challenges here, in addition to functionality and short cycle times.
Hirata products, such as robots, palletisers and depalletisers, as well as transport and automation components from other manufacturers are integrated in this automation solution. In order to keep the delivery time as short as possible, the system was designed modularly. The integration of proven palletisers, SCARA robots and Cartesian systems from Hirata ensures the necessary reliability and accuracy in individual process steps. The palletisers or depalletisers are designed in various designs, depending on the task at hand. Special devices for palletising in confined spaces are partly equipped with modular expansion options such as buffer segments and docking stations. A connection for transport trolleys as well as tray changing systems for palletising directly from commercially available floor rollers are also used according to the requirements of the application. The four-axis SCARA robots of the AR-F series installed in individual processing stations and the Cartesian systems are particularly well suited for the assembly, handling and inspection tasks that arise in this plant and are characterised by robustness and reliability.
