In today’s assembly, palletizing, sorting, injection-moulding and similar industries, products are upgraded very quickly, so their features change just as fast. Traditional vibratory-bowl feeders can no longer keep up with this rapid change. At present, most automatic work-piece feeding for robots relies on vibratory bowls or on manual placement on transfer belts or trays, both of which have serious drawbacks:

1. Manual placement

• High labour cost

• No guarantee of uniform product quality

• Safety risks

• Difficult to manage; high staff turnover

2. Traditional vibratory-bowl feeding

• Limited versatility; parts must meet certain shape and size requirements

• High cost for bowl replacement and manual re-tuning

• Long tuning time and low efficiency

• Risk of damaging part surfaces

• Large footprint; heavy vibration makes direct mounting on precision machines impossible

With the rapid development of vision-guided robotic assembly systems, a flexible feeder is urgently needed that can handle many kinds of parts and can switch products quickly. When interconnected with a camera-vision locating system and a robot gripper, the platform can recognise and control part orientation. By adjusting the stroke of the four linear motors mounted at its corners, the controller can make parts inside the pick-up tray move forward / backward / left / right and even flip over, ensuring that every part to be gripped always stays within the field of view of the industrial camera and with the correct side up. The system is highly controllable, change-over is convenient, labour input and labour intensity are reduced, and production efficiency is raised.

After the robot has removed all correctly oriented parts within the camera’s field of view, the vision system sends feedback to the controller of the flexible-feed vibration platform, which can then re-orient the remaining parts. No jamming, no wrong parts, and even mixed parts can be distinguished. Product change-over is fast and easy, labour intensity is cut, and production efficiency rises. No mechanical adjustment of the equipment is needed—only system parameters have to be updated. Together with an existing robot and a user-friendly vision control system, true unattended production can be achieved.

The motors used in flexible vibratory bowls are usually sold as assemblies of permanent magnets and copper-wire coils. The stationary part is the stator, the moving part is the slider (which may be either the magnets or the coils). The coil part uses multi-layer, full-copper enamelled wire. Poor motor consistency means that, under identical electrical settings, different motors cannot be interchanged, or after interchange their synchronism is poor. Reasons include:

• Magnet size and magnetisation method differ from batch to batch, so the magnetic centre shifts.

• Copper-wire batches differ in diameter and tolerance, causing large differences in electromagnetic centre when energised.

• Variations in the injection-moulded housing machining programme also create performance differences, making multi-motor tuning difficult.

Danikor has a complete production process and quality-control system. Its main products—flexible vibratory bowls, flexible array machines, and related accessories—meet the needs of modern agile production management: small-lot commonality and fast change-over among many varieties. We are committed to solving every automatic feeding problem and to making feeding simple. For more information, please contact us.