Robot assistance Yaskawa robots automate machining and parts cleaning

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Watts Industries Deutschland is a specialist for sanitary, heating, and cooling needs. The shortage of skilled workers forced the company to automate. Yaskawa robots were supposed to take over ...

Watts Industries Deutschland GmbH is the German subsidiary of the globally active US company Watts Water Technologies. Over 170 employees work at the site in Landau in der Pfalz. There, the company mainly produces products for water-bearing heating and air conditioning systems. What is immediately noticeable when visiting the site is the high level of in-house production. The production is accordingly well equipped. Machines of all kinds perform machining here in shift operation. This includes several identical machining centers from Alzmetall, which take over the machining of differently long tubes that later serve as distribution systems for underfloor heating.

For over 10 years, loading and unloading these machining centers was the job of trained employees who performed this job in multi-machine operation. Meanwhile, however, Watts is suffering from a severe shortage of personnel at this location. In order to ensure the continuous operation of the machines in shift operation, the only option was to invest in robots. This step opened up the possibility to qualify the employees freed up at the machines for more important tasks and to relieve them from the daily contact with coolant that inevitably comes with the loading and unloading activity, as the Watts decision-makers emphasize.

Yaskawa robots master challenging tasks

However, the idea of automating the machines and the connected parts cleaning system was anything but trivial. The specialists from EGS Automation, who were supposed to handle this, know the automation of machine tools with Yaskawa robots as standard work. But things looked different at Watts. There, EGS not only had to worry about the severely limited space available in production, but also the high tolerances of the workpiece carrier carts that provide the components for machining. These carts are sheet metal weldments that are not very precisely built because they were never intended for automation.

On one cart, up to 15 workpiece carriers with a maximum of 48 parts are stacked on top of each other and tilted. The carts are also manually deposited at a defined position on the system and locked. In order to be able to compensate for the wide tolerances of the carts for precise robot handling, EGS Automation has come up with a suitable solution! Thus, each Yaskawa 6-axis robot (type Motoman GP50) is equipped with a sensor on the gripping tool that is resistant to coolants. With this, the robot can approach several defined positions and determine a correction factor for the current coordinate system from this. Once the actual stack height, including any existing tilt, has been determined, the real challenge for the robot begins...