Cylinders and locks produced robotically

When lock manufacturer Kaba looked to boost production of its inline lock cylinders and door locks, without compromising quality, it saught state-of-the art robotics for handling small parts.

When lock manufacturer Kaba looked to boost production of its inline lock cylinders and door locks at its plant in Herzogenburg, Austria, without compromising quality, it turned to Mitsubishi for state-of-the art robotics.

Importantly, the robots not only had to be capable of reliably handling the tiny lock components, they also had to be user-friendly enough to allow integration into the manufacturing systems by Kaba's own engineers.

Kaba has built a reputation for designing innovative locks with patented technology that provides protection against drilling and prevents lock pickers from being able to determine the proper insertion depth for the key.

This prevents key copying and significantly enhances protection against burglary.

Kaba's comprehensive manufacturing programme includes door locks, lock cylinders, locking systems, security products, furniture locks and fittings for the building industry.

The Kaba Group is also at the forefront of the latest mechatronic and electronic access control systems, including high-security systems with iris and fingerprint identification for really critical applications.

The Herzogenburg plant manufacturers the market leading Gege brand of mechanical locks - a brand that can be traced back to 1862, when Gebrueder Grundman was founded by train driver Carl Grundmann.

Renowned for its high quality products and numerous patents, the company grew to become one of the world's leading lock manufacturers - so successful, in fact, that even two World Wars interrupted its operation only briefly.

The Kaba Group acquired the Gege brand and Grundman companies in 1997 to complement its own mechatronic and electronic locking systems.

The company now operates plants across the globe, with high quality, cost-effective products built upon an unwavering commitment to tapping the full potential of modern automation solutions.

Part of this need for automation comes from the seasonal nature of the business, as production manager Robert Weninghofer explains: "Our business has peak periods rather than continuous demand, as a result of the seasonal fluctuations in activity in the building industry.

The order situation is always more lively from the summer to the end of the year, and it then slows down at the beginning of the year.

We saw the use of robotics as an ideal way to help cope with the peaks in demand." Kaba assessed the use of robotics for two important areas: the milling of the lock cores, and the brush finishing of the key blanks - a monotonous and time consuming task for the staff, yet one which needs to be carried out with absolute precision, every time.

The cores are milled brass components, forming the parts of the lock into which the key is inserted.

Grooves must be milled into the cores to accommodate the small, hardened steel stop plates used by Kaba's innovative, high security cylinder system.

"Traditionally the cores are loaded into the milling machine by hand," says Weninghofer.

"But we saw the potential of robotics to both cut our costs and significantly improve our throughput times." The application is particularly demanding on the robotics, however.

The components used in the Gege range of products are extremely small, weighing between 10 and 300g - too small for everyday robots to handle reliably.

As Weninghofer researched the market, it soon became clear that only the Mitsubishi robots could combine the handling of such small parts with the essential levels of economy required.

A Mitsubishi RV-2AJ, 5-DOF (directions of freedom) robot was chosen to feed the lock cylinder cores to the milling station.

Able to handle payloads from the tiniest right up to 2kg, the RV-2AJ has a working reach of 410mm, repeatability of +/-0.02mm, speed of 2,100mm/s and a cycle period of 1.1sec.

A second 5-DOF robot, a Mitsubishi RV-5AJ, was chosen for the automation of the brush finishing operation.

RV-5AJ has a working reach of 630mm and repeatability of 0.03mm.

"These features and the outstanding cycle times made it ideal for use as part of the operation to brush-finish the keys," says Weninghofer.

"In addition, it is compact size meant we could install it directly alongside the application." The robot system picks up each key with great precision and guides it to the rotating brush that is used to provide the surface finish.

Afterwards the robot then transports the components to the ejector.

Two different types of key blanks are produced in the plant, and each is milled with a different profile.

The bow of the key - the part that is not inserted into the lock and which is gripped by the robot - can be either round or rectangular.

The robot can handle both forms, eliminating the need for retooling the brushing station for the different key types.

Since between 700,000 and 800,000 keys are brush-finished on the system per year, this represents a considerable time saving.

As important as the performance in these applications was the ease of integration.

Weninghofer reports that the Gege team was able to start getting to grips with programming the new robots almost as soon as they were delivered, and both were fully configured for the demanding applications in the space of just a few weeks.

They worked smoothly right from the start.

"All our investments in production equipment have to be economically viable from day one," says Weninghofer.

"The two Mitsubishi robots have delivered on all of criteria, providing affordable, easy to integrate products that are ideal for handling small components, and which have boosted our productivity.

The robots are also more flexible for jobs of this kind than specialised machines," he continues, "Because they can always be reprogrammed when production systems are changed or reconfigured - something that is frequently necessary in companies like ours that are continually developing their product.".

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