KA-14-009 – A major US battery manufacturer was challenged with reducing the labor cost of producing automotive battery lids. The existing work cell contained two plastic battery lid molding machines that made identical products. Labor savings was to eliminate the manual loading of lead battery terminals into each molding machine, and the manual handling of the finished lids into cases and their subsequent palletizing.
Kinesys Automation was identified as the preferred supplier to provide the system to automate this process. Our engineers worked with the customers’ engineers,
technicians, and production staff to develop the system specifications and design parameters.
Once the specifications were established, Kinesys Automation went about the task of designing a system to eliminate labor. When the engineering for this project was finalized, a design review was executed, meeting the customer’s expectations.
The system includes a robot equipped with a custom gripper that selectively picks a negative or positive terminal each oriented by a dedicated feeder bowl and places the terminal into one of eight nests on a pair of pallets. Each pallet is independently controlled and positioned by a pneumatically actuated slide. Once a pallet is loaded with the appropriate terminals, it is transported to a position accessible by a dedicated overhead Cartesian robot that picks the leads and loads them into its respective injection molding machine. Prior to the Cartesian robot returning, it first removes the completed lid from the opposite face of the molding machine and delivers the finished part to a common conveyor shared by both molding machines.
We have since made the customer a second, nearly identical machine, for a second processing line.
