At the service of the injection moulding

Under the global banner of “Your Free Choice in Robots”, Sepro Robotique exhibits at Fakuma 2014 a total of fourteen robots. Nine are demonstrated on the Sepro stand and five in the booths of injection-molding machine manufacturers. Together, they represent one of the industry’s most complete ranges of automation equipment for plastics injection molding. Highlights on the stand include in particular the 5X Line and 6X Visual models, together in an automation cell. Two 6-axis articulated-arm units are shown operating together with three 5-axis Cartesian robots in an entertaining i-Pad relay. The demonstration has been designed to point out the similarities and differences between the 5-axis Cartesian configuration and the 6-axis articulated design.

An MI-20 unit for the multi-material injection moulding is shown in operation on a 210-ton Sumitomo Demag machine with a two-position rotating mold for making ice scrapers with soft-touch gripping surfaces. The Multi-Inject robots (available in two different sizes for injection-molding machines up to 500 tones) are specially designed for applications where the secondary vertical injection unit would interfere with movement of a standard beam robot.

Finally, a Success 7, the smallest unit in the Success line of general-purpose robots, is paired with an S3 all-servo sprue picker to play with jumbo plastic building blocks. Compared to standard pneumatically driven sprue pickers, the new S3 servo unit is faster, operating at 2 m/s speeds on the vertical axis. It is also more accurate and repeatable, more reliable and requires less maintenance. In addition to conventional sprue removal applications, the S3 picker can be used for simple part removal.