Kada looks to Mitsubishi for robots
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Mitsubishi Electric Automation Systems product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Dec 19, 2005
When Austrian lock manufacturer Kaba looked to boost production of its inline lock cylinders and door locks without compromising quality, it turned to Mitsubishi for its robotics.
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 its robotics.
The robots had to be capable of handling the tiny lock components and be user-friendly enough to allow integration into the manufacturing systems by Kaba's engineers.
Kaba locks provide protection against drilling and prevent lock pickers from determining the insertion depth for the key.
This prevents key copying and improves protection against burglary.
Kaba's manufacturing programme includes door locks, lock cylinders, locking systems, security products, furniture locks and fittings for the building industry.
Kaba is also involved with mechatronic and electronic access control systems, including high-security systems with iris and fingerprint identification.
The Herzogenburg plant manufacturers the Gege brand of mechanical locks - a brand that can be traced back to 1862, when Gebruder Grundman was founded by train driver Carl Grundmann, and which Kaba acquired in 1997.
Part of this need for automation came from the seasonal nature of the business.
Production Manager Robert Weninghofer explained: "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 robotics for two areas - the milling of the lock cores and the brush finishing of the key blanks.
This is a monotonous and time consuming task for the staff, yet one which needs to be carried out with 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 the high security cylinder system.
Traditionally, the cores are loaded into the milling machine by hand, and the application is even demanding on the robotics.
The components used weigh between 10 and 300g, too small for everyday robots to handle reliably, so a Mitsubishi RV-2AJ, five-DOF (directions of freedom) robot was chosen to feed the lock cylinder cores to the milling station.
Able to handle payloads up to 2kg, the RV-2AJ has a working reach of 410mm, repeatability of +/-0.02mm, speed of 2100mm/s and a cycle period of 1.1s.
A second five-DOF robot, a Mitsubishi RV-5AJ, was chosen for the automation of the brush finishing.
The RV-5AJ has a working reach of 630mm and repeatability of +/-0.03mm.
The robot picks up each key and guides it to the rotating brush that is used to provide the surface finish.
Afterwards, the robot transports the components to the ejector.
Two 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.
Between 700,000 and 800,000 keys are brush-finished on the system each year.
Both robots were configured for the applications in a few weeks.
The robots can also be reprogrammed when production systems are changed or reconfigured.
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