Development of Automatic Beads Loading System for the Slider Circulating Stand of Linear Guides

The partner company is one of the major linear guide manufactures in Taiwan. Currently, the products are assembled manually. To advance production efficiency, improve product quality while enhancing the company‘s image, this project takes an automatic bead-loading system of linear guides as the starting point to help the company establish automated production lines. Central controller of this automated loading system is a combination of a personal computer (PC) and a programmable logic controller (PLC). The controller regulates specially designed clamp fixtures and dispensing mechanisms to feed beads into slider circulating stands of linear guides. The complementary combination of PLC and PC is an ideal arrangement of controller. Compared to PC, PLC is more reliable for real-time sequence and logic control, but is incapable of complex judgments and data processing, and providing user-definable human-machine interface. The PC is also responsible for generating high-level instructions for PLC, together with statistical processing and recording, contributing to continuous quality improvement. In designing the clamp fixtures and mechanisms, we employed 3D printed prototype for the physical shape and function confirmation. The completed system is divided into six stations, arranged in the form of “U“, which is designed to meet the need for modular construction and ease of access for maintenance. Each station uses the X-Y-Z mobile platform as the main structure, and uses different fixtures for the works of installing the cover, reversing the workpiece, and filling the beads. Via this successful industry-university cooperation, the company can employ the system to reduce labor costs, increase productivity and improve product quality and consistency.

Project ID:PB10411-0091
External Project ID:MOST104-2622-E182-006-CC3