FEATURE Robotics
The new ASRS took just nine months to deliver from a standing start – which is impressive considering supply chain delays due to the pandemic
retrieval. However, this was no standard Cartesian handling system.
Bowyer explained: “The conventional way to run a Cartesian handling system is to mechanically link the pair of actuators to a single motor so that they work as one. In this instance, it wasn’t possible to do that because we couldn’t have a mechanical tie across the base of the system. Also, it would have resulted in an extremely large motor that would have created power issues. So, we elected to have independent motors on each Z axis and run them in a master-slave control combination.”
drives in each ASRS module are tied together with a communication link. The controller one mimics it. The system design parameters pushed our industrial automation expertise to the limit. We had to modify some of the software to enable our CMMT controllers to deliver the desired levels of performance. The ASRS design also raised challenges for
Lumico. Kennington said: “Handling HDDs make work seamlessly together. We opted for an IPC (the Kunbus RevPi Connect 3) rather than a PLC to achieve the necessary ‘on it’ with any issues arising from this decision. Their senior management team were fully engaged in the automation design and troubleshooting, and their engineers responded with a software rewrite to make this unusual automation solution work.” cost of failure because the machine would rip itself apart if the axes got out of phase. To
minimise this risk. RH Electrical Engineering incorporated a laser beam sensing solution which monitors above and below the end shuts down immediately if the axes were to get out of sync. To avoid any crash risk, the beam detector also checks that no disks are protruding from the storage racks. the HDD manufacturer has increased and improved manufacturing capacity. The barcoded products also improve traceability, which is crucial to gaining the environmental, are vital to securing future contracts.
Festo
www.festo.com/gb/en/
Raising the benchmark
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automationmagazine.co.uk Kawasaki Robotics (UK) Ltd Automation | February 2025 17
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