Large Plate Stacker

Edgewater Automation Posted 05/30/2012

Background:
A recent client is a major contributor in the stored power industry, who does large plate stacking in the battery assembly process.

The Challenge:
Our client was manually stacking magnetically charged plates that are 16″x16″ and 4lbs. each. The obvious challenge to overcome was how to automate the stacking of the plates, so that it didn’t take two operators a whole day to make 2-3 batteries. The other challenges that manually stacking the plates brought up were that the operators miscounted the plates and had trouble stacking them straight.

The Journey:
The operators manually stacking the plates was a physically demanding, slow, unreliable operation because the process needed to be repeated 136 times. There was no way of avoiding human errors in counting or in plate placement.

Solution:
Edgewater Automation designed and built a robotic plate stacker assembly machine that was fully automated using two robots and a programmable paper feed and cut machine. This is a unique solution because one robot picked up the plate with a vacuum, while the other robot picked up the paper with a vacuum. The robots interchanged the positive and the negative charged plates with the paper in between while using cameras for a vision guided placement while automatically counting the plates.

All the operator has to do now is change the paper roll and load cassettes on to a tray for automatic pickup.

Benefits:
Edgewater Automation’s automatic large plate stacker assembly machine has tremendously improved stack accuracy, count accuracy, and assembly speed. What used to take 24 hours is now capable of producing a battery every 15-16 minutes.