Machining has evolved rapidly from manual to CNC machining. Both processes have always demanded massive human involvement in production.
However, the changing market demands better ways of production. For instance, the perfection of the fourth industrial revolution has seen many industries need thin chips.
The production calls for improved precision. Better yet, the firms have to be exceptional to compete in the changing machining market.
The most definitive path to stand out is to produce output quality and quickly. That is the motivation behind robot application in machining roles
Here, you will find out how the tools work and why the current production requires robot involvement. Let’s get started.
Explaining the Machining Tools
There are various machining tools, the primary ones being:
- Turning
- Drilling
- Milling
- Grinding
- Pressing
1. Turning
Turning is one of the most familiar industrial machining tasks. It is a process that demands utmost accuracy.
It often mixes other machining technologies such as boring, reaming, countersinking, counterboring, and threading.
Boring is the cutting of excess metal from the raw material. Cutting occurs at a single point. Here, you take a material around a cutting tool.
In boring, you enlarge a hole that has already been drilled from a single point. The primary target of boring is to broaden the diameter of a metal.
The most typical machine used is the boring tool. In reaming, you further finish the hole’s surfaces. You can improve the tolerance and accuracy of the metal’s dimensions using reaming.
Threading allows you to make precise metal lines in hard materials. It mainly takes place in ball screw mechanisms.
Counterboring helps you achieve high-precision holes with conical bottoms. On the other hand, you can realize a flat-bottomed hole using countersinking.
2. Drilling
Drilling is often confused with turning. Although there are similarities between the two activities, here are the exceptional differences between them.
In turning, the key player is the boring tool. It removes extra materials from the workpiece’s external surface when the workpiece is stationary.
Drilling, by contrast, removes unwanted material from the workpiece’s interior surface. The main types of drilling are directional, rotary, cable, electro, and dual-wall reverse circulation drilling.
The most familiar drilling type is rotary drilling. Here, the cutting material spins around the rotary spinning material. The resulting product has a uniform cross-section.
The process produces high heat. That happens because drilling a solid material requires quick revolutions ranging between a hundred and thousand rotations per second.
3. Milling
Another machining tool that demands the application of machining robotics is milling. It entails sideways removal of the excess substance from a material.
The milling machine cuts the material with the side of the bit.
It composes edging, shouldering, or grooving. Edging occurs on a single surface. Shouldering entails two surfaces, while grooving often combines more than three surfaces.
There are three main types of milling. These are grooving, end, and peripheral milling.
Grooving includes interrupted material cutting into breakable chips. It can produce slots of various sizes and shapes, such as long, open or closed, narrow or deep.
End milling is the use of a cylindrical cutter with numerous periphery and tip-cutting edges.
Peripheral milling (often called plain milling) is the most typical milling type. Here, the surface of the workpiece gets mounted to the milling table. The cutter then rests on a standard arbor on a horizontal plane with a spindle.
The parallel positioning of the milling machine and the workpiece leads to the massive dropping of unwanted material portions.
4. Grinding
Grinding is the removal of minute portions of a workpiece. An abrasive wheel is often required in grinding.
The repeated abrasion produces fine granules through mechanical breakdown. Here, utmost accuracy is needed for consistency and quality.
For example, a standard grinding machine possesses a tolerance of 0.0025mm.
5. Pressing
Pressing is a typical machining role that incorporates several activities. Some of the pressing needs are shearing, bending, forging, drawing, forming, and blanking.
Also, pressing is useful in squeezing, hammering, coining, upsetting, and flanging. The voluminous pressing needs require a multi-purpose machine with utmost flexibility.
The Role of Robots in Machining Needs
Robots are crucial in various machining roles. They help in keeping consistency, flexibility, scalability, and speedy returns.
Be Consistent
The core machining tasks demand output of consistent quality. You can be assured of quality output through robots’ precision.
For example, attaining consistent 0.0025mm tolerance during grinding demands the confirmed accuracy of most robots. Besides, you can maintain the quantity of the produce through robots because you can undertake 24/7 production.
Lastly, most collaborative robots enable you to realize time consistency through predetermined output durations.
Reduce Operational Costs
The main challenge of traditional machining is the high production costs. The propelled wages and material costs scare away multiple firms from utilizing the trending robotic machining.
However, the emergence of affordable and efficient collaborative robots helps firms squeeze production costs. They relieve employees of repetitive, boring, and unsafe industrial production environments.
Enjoy Flexibility
Collaborative robots enable you to achieve flexibility through role changing and arm motion. You can undertake various production roles using cobots.
For example, a typical manufacturing cobot helps you to conduct numerous pressing needs during machining. That is possible because of their reduced sizes, various joints, articulations, and manipulators.
Joints enable the arms to move freely. Articulations are meeting points of various joints. Manipulators are arms with both fixed and freely moving ends.
Ease Operations
Introducing collaborative robots in machining simplifies operations.
For example, they relieve you of the burden of learning technical skills to work with robots. You deploy them instantly due to quick installation and usage.
Propel ROI
Lastly, introducing robots in machining enables you to deliver more production with less input.
For example, you can squeeze costs and downtimes, while improving the output quality and quantity.
Conclusion
The core machining roles that require robots are turning, milling, grinding, drilling, and pressing. The effectiveness and efficiency of robots enable you to achieve more output with less input.
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