Development of robotic technology to trim custom molded polyurethanes parts

我们的行业合作伙伴Talmolder成立于1980年，是办公家具行业的模塑泡沫供应商。多年来，许多创新的想法被开发出来，使Talmolder能够为行业制造定制的模塑聚氨酯部件，例如，医疗保健，商店固定装置，座椅，青少年，运输，广告，建筑，体育和娱乐等产品以环保，有竞争力的价格和质量按时交付。制造过程中的一个步骤是修剪零件。在聚氨酯行业中，不仅在Talmolder，这种修剪步骤一直是手动进行的：需要熟练的工人仔细切割部件的边缘，以保持产品的质量。与机器人过程相比，与手动过程相关的问题是：i）过程缓慢， 即使有熟练的工人; ii）劳动力成本高; iii）零件的切割质量难以控制以获得高精度。 在这项拟议的研究中，我们的目标是开发机器人技术来修剪聚氨酯部件。将开发一个主体固定臂，以牢固地固定正在修剪的部件;将开发一个边缘固定臂，以与激光臂一起移动，并使用激光束修剪边缘;激光臂由具有先进图像处理功能的相机引导，以正确切割边缘。这项初步的研究和开发工作将建立一个显着改进的生产工艺。这将是聚氨酯行业迈向过程自动化的重要一步，减少人为错误并有效提高产品质量。

Our industry partner, Talmolder, was established in 1980 as a supplier of molded foams for the office furniture industry. Through the years, many innovative ideas were developed that allowed Talmolder to manufacture custom molded polyurethanes parts for the industries, such as, health care, store fixtures, seating, juvenile, transit, advertising, construction, sports and recreation, etc. The products are delivered on time with environmentally friendly, competitive pricing and quality. One of the steps of the manufacturing process is to trim the parts. In polyurethanes industry, not only at Talmolder, this trimming step has been conducted manually: skilled works are required to carefully cut the edge of the parts to maintain quality of the products. Compared with the robotic process, the problems associated with the manual process are: i) the process is slow, even with skilled workers; ii) the cost of labors is high; iii) the cutting quality of the parts is hard to be controlled for high precision. In this proposed research we aim to develop robotic technology to trim the polyurethanes parts. A body hold arm will be developed to hold firmly the part under trimming; an edge hold arm will be developed to move together with a laser arm with laser beam to trim the edge; the laser arm is guided by a camera with advanced image processing capabilities to cut the edge properly. This initial research and development work will establish a significantly improved production process. This will be a significant step towards process automation in the polyurethanes industry, reducing human errors and effectively boosting product quality.