Manufacturers have many factors to consider when designing equipment to manufacture products in the plastics industry. Six-axis jointed robots can offer significant cost savings during mold design and manufacture, as well as during production.
Using a Robotic Automation to machine cavities in the part enables moldmakers to simplify mold design with fewer moving parts, like retractable cores. Removing core features from the molded part also eliminates obstacles to material flow, which further simplifies design. Machining core features instead of molding enables easy product changes, requiring no costly mold retrofits.
In addition, robots have the capability to do insert molding applications. Robotic Automation can place inserts very accurately into the mold. Compared to a manual operation, it is much more efficient since the machine can be run in full-automatic mode. When placing the inserts manually Robotic Automation, the operator needs to stop the machine, disable guarding, place inserts and re-enable the safeties, losing valuable production time.
