Sanipa, a manufacturer of premium bathroom furniture based in the Middle Franconian town of Treuchtlingen in Bavaria, uses industrial manufacturing equipment but, on request, can fully adapt its products to its customers' requirements. The company contacted toolcraft to help it automate previously manual processes. The result was the development of two automated solutions. The first is a 6-axis picking robot from Fanuc (R-2000iC/125L), which operates on an existing CNC machining cell, picks up parts, passes them through a labelling station and sets them down in a specified position. The second is a robot cell which automatically assembles drawers. In the drawer cell, another Fanuc robot (M-20iB/25) picks up the drawer components from a conveyor belt and puts them in a press, where the bases and rear panels are screwed together and the frames and inserts are assembled in a fully automated process. This enables single pieces of bathroom furniture to be made at the touch of a button. These processes were previously performed manually, which meant the work was both time-consuming and monotonous. Above all, manual processes do not yield consistent results. “In line with the client's requirements, we developed a concept which covers and automates all the steps involved,” says Thomas Wieland, head of engineering and robotics at toolcraft. The automated solutions must be capable of machining parts of varying weights and sizes, which increase in increments of one millimetre (batches of one). During the construction of the manufacturing equipment, the team took into account both the logical order of the processing steps and the need to observe the specified cycle times. After the concept development, visualisation and construction of the system, a test setup was carried out at toolcraft before the systems were commissioned at Sanipa. Since then, the milled parts are separated in an automated process and the drawer systems roll off the production line automatically.
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