smallest pick and place robot

I am looking for a recommendation for a pick and place arm that only has to move a very light weight piece. Distance is not that far either. What is the smallest arm available for continuious use?

Thanks

Jason

Jason H said:

I am looking for a recommendation for a pick and place arm that only has to move a very light weight piece. Distance is not that far either. What is the smallest arm available for continuious use?

Click to expand...

Not sure which is smallest but you might want to think in terms of service and replacement parts too. In that light, can tell you that Adept is known historically for small pick and place bots, but their replacement parts are insanely priced. I thought I needed a new CPU module for one once and the cost was something like $10,000. Luckily the actual problem was something else I fixed on my own.

HGR Surplus sometimes has small Hitachi pick and place robots cheap...but you need to make sure "it's all there" as they are famous for selling robots without controls or missing teach pendants.

If your pick and place is simple 2 or 3 axis move you can use the semi gantry style used to load injection molders....they practically give those away in the used market.

If you only need 3 axis movement, check out SCARA robots, these are used extensively in the simiconductor industry. Very fast, extremely precise. There are several manufacturers including Adept as mentioned by Milacron.
You can also, as mentioned, go with a gantry set-up, you can buy pre-configured units from folks like Festo, Schunk, and several others.
If you need 4 or 6 axis motion, look at a Kawasaki FS3 or FS6. (Probably the new RS by now, which is *extremely fast* for an articulated arm robot).

Questions:
What is the Kg load to be moved?
What is the actual distance to be moved?
What is the cycle time required?
What will your EOAT (end of arm tooling) weight?
What type of EOAT will be needed (suction cup/gripper/custom/etc)
Does the part need re-oriented during transport?
Ballpark Project Budget?

The more information you can provide to us, the better we will be able to help you narrow your search.

Again - weight / distance is relative - I have worked on robotic positioners that precisely manuever 50,000 lb wing boxes for Boeing and eensy weensy (technical term) robots that install o-rings in chain saw chain during manufacture.

As for Adept - another vote for smallish robots. When HP shut down manufacturing here locally a while back, you could buy them 3 to a pallet load for $100 each.