Market Application Background
The XY+PPU cam-driven robotic arm, combined with a flexible vibrating tray system, enables rapid and precise material gripping through visual positioning and automatic placement onto designated pallets or tape carriers. Compared to traditional Z/R axis structures, the PPU cam robotic arm offers superior handling efficiency and positioning accuracy, demonstrating significant advantages in flexible material handling scenarios involving scattered materials, and effectively replacing traditional manual tray placement methods.
This solution is suitable for the arrangement, traying, and packaging of tiny parts such as electronic components and precision hardware.
Limitations of traditional automatic loading and unloading
● Limited flexibility: Bowl-type vibratory feeders are typically designed for specific products and are poorly adaptable to changes in size and shape, making them prone to jamming.
● Speed and efficiency limitations: In scenarios requiring high-speed production, it is easily limited by issues such as the speed and efficiency of mechanical design, vision processing, and motion control data interaction, making it impossible to meet the needs of high-volume production lines or rapid material changeover production.
● Complex system integration: It involves multiple components such as robots, vision systems, control systems, and feeding systems. Differences in protocols and data formats between devices may lead to compatibility issues and increase the debugging cycle.
● Poor data flow: Older systems may not support real-time data processing or remote monitoring, creating information silos that limit the implementation of smart manufacturing and prevent seamless integration with MES systems.
● High cost issues: Multiple sets of hardware need to be purchased, and the market costs of personnel and maintenance remain high, increasing the company's operating costs.
Positive motion vision flexible feeding solution
Zheng Motion has developed the VPLC series vision motion control all-in-one machine PPU cam robot soft vibration swing plate solution to meet market demand. Through the combination of point teaching and RTFuse fast configuration, it realizes one-stop and rapid development of loading and unloading equipment, effectively shortens the project cycle, reduces operation and maintenance and labor costs, and improves enterprise revenue and production line automation level.
This solution integrates RTFuse quick configuration software with a dedicated tray-mounting program, combining visual positioning, motion control, and other functions into one unit. It provides users with highly flexible device function customization capabilities, significantly reducing cable waste and simplifying communication processes. While reducing development complexity for users, it effectively saves overall costs and is compatible with third-party testing equipment and standard communication protocol interfaces.
Design of hardware solution for positive motion vision flexible feeding solution
1. 24DI: Connects to origin, limit, and other sensors, as well as switch signals, encoders, etc.
2. 12DO: High-speed output port connected to the hard trigger input of industrial cameras and dispensing valves.
3. EtherCAT Interface: Connects to the EtherCAT bus driver to control the movement of other axes.
4. RS232 communication interface: connected to the light source controller.
5. Ethernet Interface: Gigabit Ethernet port, for connecting area scan cameras supporting the Gigabit protocol to achieve visual positioning and detection applications.
6. Four-channel local pulse output: connected to a pulse driver to control the conveyor belt.
Motion control and machine vision technology implementation
Machine Vision
During the PPU robotic arm's soft vibration loading and unloading process, the machine vision system first uses a shape matching tool to coarsely locate multiple materials on the tray. Then, through coordinate coefficient calibration, the world coordinates of the materials are transmitted to the robotic arm for grasping. Subsequently, the materials are sequentially moved to the lower camera's imaging position for visual imaging, performing secondary positioning to correct position deviations. This facilitates the PPU cam robotic arm's precise unloading at the unloading area, improving positioning accuracy to meet customer needs.
Motion control
First, the vibratory feeder is triggered by I/O to vibrate rapidly, ensuring even distribution of the material within the feeder. After the upper camera captures and processes the material, the PPU cam-driven robotic arm moves along a preset path based on the processed visual data, achieving precise point-to-point motion control. The robotic arm sequentially performs the following operations: material gripping, secondary imaging, and unloading. Throughout the process, the control system adjusts the speed of each joint of the robotic arm in real time to achieve a smoother motion trajectory.
Motion trajectory settings
Types of sports modes
Flexible vibratory feeder
The positive motion vision flexible feeding solution supports direct adjustment of the amplitude and frequency of the flexible vibratory feeder in the flexible vibration loading and unloading process, which enhances the integration of the system solution. Even in scenarios where materials are frequently changed, there is still no need to open the flexible vibratory feeder debugging software for adjustment.
Robotic arm vision-based flexible vibration feeding process
Solution Hardware Configuration
Advantages of the solution
1. Strong hardware and software integration: It integrates EtherCAT bus, pulse hybrid control, machine vision, motion control, and hardware and software integration, which facilitates equipment debugging and troubleshooting, reduces costs and hardware footprint;
2. Efficiency Improvement: MotionRT7's internal data interaction, combined with multiple nozzles, PSO, and high-precision, highly stable visual positioning algorithms, reduces motion travel, shortens project development cycles, and improves production efficiency;
3. Low technical barrier: Drag-and-drop Chinese configuration vision, application engineers can easily get started after simple training;
4. High precision: The vision system identifies the material position, eliminating the need for fixed fixtures to specify the material feeding direction, and accurately positions the material in the vibratory feeder;
5. Flexible Production: The system can save vision and motion control configuration programs for multiple materials, enabling one-click switching of process packages. It can flexibly handle workpieces of different sizes and shapes without frequent hardware changes, reducing production line downtime.
02. Highly Integrated Machine Vision and Motion Control All-in-One Machine VPLC712
The VPLC712 machine vision motion control all-in-one machine vision controller is an EtherCAT bus vision motion controller based on the x86 architecture. It adopts an integrated design, integrating real-time machine vision, motion control, I/O, and monitoring onto a single multi-core controller. This enables multi-task parallel real-time processing of automated equipment tasks. Through a shared memory mechanism, PC hardware resources are configured via MotionRT7 to achieve high-speed intra-core interaction, drive actuators to perform corresponding operations, and complete the overall control of the equipment.
The VPLC series machine vision motion control integrated machine is easy to install and remove, occupies little space, and can be seamlessly integrated with other control unit components (such as servo drives, sensors, encoders, control valves, etc.) to provide a complete end-to-end vision motion control solution.
The VPLC712 machine vision motion control all-in-one machine supports up to 64 axes and has a minimum EtherCAT communication cycle of 500µs. It features 20 digital inputs, 20 digital outputs, and 4 high-speed latch inputs; as well as 2 local differential pulse axes, 2 AD converters, and 2 DA converters.
03. RTFuse Visual Flexible Vibration Feeding Application
In response to market demands, ZhengMotion has developed the RTFuse vision-based flexible vibration loading and unloading solution based on the VPLC series vision motion control all-in-one machine. By combining point teaching with RTFuse quick configuration, it can achieve one-stop and rapid development of loading and unloading equipment, effectively shortening the project cycle. Operators can complete material conversion in the shortest time by simply adjusting the parameters of the vision and motion control function modules, realizing high-speed and high-precision flexible loading and unloading of robotic arms.
Camera Support
It supports most mainstream cameras on the market, and supports parallel acquisition from 4 cameras and visual aerial photography.
▌Quick Configuration
Robotic arm, shaft assembly, vibratory feeder, camera and matrix feeder, tool parameters.
▌Teaching Function
It provides one-click teaching functions for multiple points such as material picking, aerial photography, and material feeding paths.
▌Coordinate Calibration
Supports camera calibration, including modification of XY coordinate direction and world coordinate position correction.
▌Positioning
Automatic calibration can be completed with a single click using the pre-taught motion points.
▌System Switching
It can be switched to the RTFuse fast configuration system to implement the visual inspection process.
▌Visual Interface
The interface is user-friendly and facilitates data monitoring, displaying real-time status, return-to-home status, number of locations, and placement count.
Supported robotic arm types
4-axis module, SCARA robot, DELTA parallel robot, Cartesian coordinate robot, 6-joint robot, etc.
