ANCA focuses on robotics

One of the stands highlights will be a new custom designed and built industrial robot loader.

The loader has been fully designed and built in-house by ANCA’s experienced engineering team in recognition that the market is moving towards greater automation.

Pat McCluskey, ANCA’s co-founder and lead designer on the project said: “As the lead designer on the robot development project I’ve been asked by industry players, ‘how can ANCA develop its own industrial robot?’ Basically, it’s a logical extension for our company whose strength is having multi-disciplinary technical expertise and an intimate knowledge of the CNC market. It’s actually a relatively simple task to develop the mechanical aspects of an industrial robot, but to make it function successfully you better be expert in designing your own CNC System, digital servo drives and core software. These skills I believe are ANCA’s unique strengths in the tool grinding industry.”

The ANCA robot does not use a separate free-standing controller, the control system software actually runs concurrently within the machine’s CNC core software and uses the machine’s operator panel and handheld pendant to perform the teaching. If operators can use an ANCA Tool Grinder, they can use an ANCA robot as well and its service engineers can easily fix the ANCA robot.

Mr McCluskey added: “We pride ourselves on providing customers with a complete ANCA machine solution and that is why we have invested in developing our own industrial robot.”

Another new ANCA development at the show will be a duel robot grinding cell. CNC grinders now have the capacity to integrate several manufacturing operations into a single production line in ANCA’s market first multi-robot production cell solution. The single-base cell includes automated part loading, high precision grinding, and quality assurance, outproducing the previous multi-machine process while achieving part quality requirements.

Using a single robot, ANCA’s TXcell automated grinding cell can automatically load grinding wheel packs, and the workpiece – a highly successful approach for ANCA customers manufacturing rotary cutting tools. And, with the addition of a second robot in the TXcell, the machine can complete secondary operations unmanned.

Also this year at EMO, ANCA Motion will present several motion control solutions including its laser cutting package which is specifically developed to deliver best in class process performance on a variety of machine configurations.

It will also be showcasing flexible open CNC software packages that can be tailored to customer’s requirements. Its Commander software is designed to allow human operators to seamlessly monitor and interact with processed data. The software allows custom interfaces and functionality, with no programming skills required.

ANCA
Hall 6, Stand K59 www.anca.com/Home