For high cavitation and lights out/dark factory situations, a robots end of arm tooling (EOAT) tends to be heavy in order to pick-up and eject large amounts of products.

And getting heavy tools to align accurately with multiple cavities at fast speeds without the need for human intervention, means once a robot is structurally setup for use, anything that could vary the movement must be eliminated.

So how does a traditional robot belt drive suddenly vary my production line?

Traditional high-speed robots use high-tension rubber timing belts to drive their vertical and horizontal axes.

Overtime operating a very heavy EOAT during thousands of high-speed cycles causes these drive belts to naturally stretch and degrade by a fraction of a millimetre.

This micro-stretching overtime causes over stretch and a spring back (similar visually to a rubber band wearing out).

This introduces a vibration into the movement as the inertia from the micro-stretching travels down in the robot and into the tool, causing critical misalignment and damages including:

• Factory-wide hour long production stoppage

• Increase in engineers/engineer time for fixes

• Forces factories into slower cycles (reducing ROI)

• Increases Opex from repair to tool, belt, call out fees

• Multi-million dollar tool damage

• Reject increase as vibration causes products to fall/be damaged

• Introduces contamination from belt shed (scrapping clean room registrations in medical parts)