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The Viper MBC robot from Visumatic Industrial Products, Lexington, Ky. (www.visumatic.com), delivers and installs a wide range of fasteners, including screws, nuts, bolts, pins, clips, brass rings, and barbed darts. Conventional screw-installing robots use a pick-and-place approach that send screws to an intermediate location where they sit until the robot picks one up. This means the robot must return from the work area to the pick-up point for each screw. The Viper, by feeding screws directly to the tooling tip, eliminates travel time and cuts assembly times in half.
The new installer also has a zero-offset design, an improvement over conventional methods of mounting the installation tool at the extreme end of the robot arm, which gives an exaggerated cantilever effect. Screw-tightening torque is transferred directly to the extended joints, and bulk of the tooling payload is magnified and applied to them as well.
On the Viper, tooling is located at the end of the second Scara joint. Joints 3 and 4 are never subjected to tightening forces, and loads on these joints are reduced to roughly one-third of the tooling mass. This results in fast motion, extended robot life, and lets users size their robot for the work envelope. The robot can exert up to 150 lb-in. of tightening torque.
Edited by Stephen J. Mraz