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Destacker with adaptive vacuum gripper
Concept for destacking perforated sheet-metal blanks up to 3000 × 1500 mm. The sheet is aligned in a reference corner, only one row of suction cups follows the format. The operator no longer has to enter the cell.
- Industry
- Sheet-metal industry
- Scope
- Concept, design calculations, verification, implementation plan
- Sheet format
- up to 3000 × 1500 mm, 0.5–1.0 mm steel or aluminium
- Suction cups
- 2 rows of 10, each with spring plunger and contact sensor
- Adjustment travel
- 1100 mm (opposite row)
Starting point
On the existing destacker, the suction cups were fixed and had to be repositioned by hand with clamping levers at every format change. Pallet and stack position were not reproducible.
The consequences: suction cups hit the perforation and lost vacuum, sheets dropped, and the operator had to align sheets by hand inside the danger zone.
Solution
The sheet gets a fixed coordinate system. A pallet stop and a corner guide bring every sheet into the same reference corner. The reference row of suction cups is set once. Only the opposite row moves to the target dimension from the order.
Every suction cup sits on a spring plunger with a contact sensor. Before lifting, the controller checks that exactly the expected cups have contact and that vacuum is present in each row. If the pattern does not match, the sheet is not lifted.
Implementation is planned in three stages: first mechanical referencing, then contact sensors with target/actual comparison, finally the motorised opposite row with its set point taken from the recipe.
Result
- No entry into the cell at format changes
- No manual repositioning of suction cups
- Mis-picks are detected before the sheet is lifted
- Holding force, deflection and tolerance chain verified by calculation