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Etienne_Samson
Beta Tester Beetle, Wrist Camera URCap 1.3.0, Vacuum Beta tester Posts: 419 Handy
Challenge with part feeding |
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Answered | |
/ Most recent by Ryan_Weaver
in Applications
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4 comments |

Hi Pros!
We have all experienced problem around part feeding to the robot, most of the time it's the blocker in our projects. Several solutions are available on the market, using jigs & fixtures, using bowl feeder, vibraiting table, using 2D vision, 3D vision etc.
I'd like to hear from you today is how do you select them, what do you use, when and why. Have you tried doing your own? Do you use standard solutions? How do you choose to go with vision or not? What are your biggest challenge with part feeding?
@matthewd92 @Enric @Ryan_Weaver I'll tag you guys since you are my heroes but I know a lot of people will have to share on this.
Merci
We have all experienced problem around part feeding to the robot, most of the time it's the blocker in our projects. Several solutions are available on the market, using jigs & fixtures, using bowl feeder, vibraiting table, using 2D vision, 3D vision etc.
I'd like to hear from you today is how do you select them, what do you use, when and why. Have you tried doing your own? Do you use standard solutions? How do you choose to go with vision or not? What are your biggest challenge with part feeding?
@matthewd92 @Enric @Ryan_Weaver I'll tag you guys since you are my heroes but I know a lot of people will have to share on this.
Merci

Etienne Samson
Technical Support Director
+1 418-380-2788 ext. 207
[email protected]
[email protected]
- Can the objects be easily stacked? Maybe on a rod?
- Could they be loaded into a "PEZ-dispenser" type tool?
- If they're rods, could they be singulated with an elevator tool, that pushes one up at a time?
- If they won't interleave and stick together, would they be a good fit for a vibratory table like Asyril?
- If none of the above, can they be loaded into a grid pallet?
Like @matthewd92 was saying, we always go to the simplest option first. The problem is that many times a customer doesn't see value in the robot if they first need to have someone take parts from a box and put them into a grid, or stack them up. Instead, they could just have that same person load the machine. So, we trend towards automated solutions, but they all tend to be custom in some way.
No, we don't typically design them ourselves. It's not really what we're suited for. Sometimes we'll do a custom tray for an Asyril feeder, but we almost never do pallets, stacking tools, or other custom designs. We occasionally leverage small engineer-for-hire or integrators for that kind of work, but it's not a smooth process.
Ryan Weaver | Automation Engineer | Axis New England
[email protected]
https://www.youtube.com/user/AxisNewEngland
https://twitter.com/axis_newengland
[email protected]
It would be great if we had some kind of "Erector Set" kit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erector_Set in case you didn't have these in QC growing up) that could build feeders for common part shapes or sizes. It's probably asking too much, but if we could feed 80% of the parts we came across in the field, we would undoubtedly sell more solutions.
Ryan Weaver | Automation Engineer | Axis New England
[email protected]
https://www.youtube.com/user/AxisNewEngland
https://twitter.com/axis_newengland