Based on the lean and mean philosophy, more and more companies are looking at where the production process can be organized even more efficiently. For the welding process, this means, among other things, reducing programming time, unmanned deployment of welding robots, linking the production to ERP systems, increasing the uptime of welding robots and monitoring and adjusting the welding production. In order to meet this demand, Valk Welding has developed several software solutions in recent years, which enable customers to automate, structure, manage and optimize the welding process.
Data exchange between the office and production environment forms the basis for the development of software tools that enable both machines and robots to do their work with as few actions as possible. Customers therefore want to be able to control production from their ERP, so that programmers from the work preparation can determine to which robot they want to assign a welding program and communicate directly with the operator on the shop floor.
Valk Welding therefore supplies SFC (Shop Floor Control); an application that automates, structures and manages the robotized welding process. SFC automates the process from planning to operator instructions. The platform uses the ability of the Panasonic robots to request and send live data. For example, the operator scans a code at the robot installation to automatically provide the robot installation with the correct and most recent set of robot programs. But this code can also be read automatically by the robot when it is, for example, on the welding jig.
SFC runs on a separate Robot Object Server (ROSE) and thus provides both the management of the factory control, as well as a structured workflow and the automation of program management between the office and production environment.
After more than twenty years of experience and further development of offline programming of Panasonic welding robots with DTPS, the software engineers at Valk Welding have developed QPT (Quick Programming Tool) to further simplify programming and further reduce programming time. Especially when programming products within the same product family, it is desirable not to have to reprogram the same program blocks for each variant. With QPT, Valk Welding offers a macro module within DTPS, with which you can copy, scale, multiply and combine existing program blocks with other program blocks. In this way, you do not have to reprogram every recurring operation.
QPT is part of the entire ARP (Automatic Robot Programming) program of Valk Welding under which other software developments also take place. There are already solutions to generate fully automatic robot programs from a 3D CAD file. More about this soon.
Companies that have several welding robots at their disposal want more and more insight and control over the performance of the welding robots, the process and maintenance. Valk Welding has developed MIS (Management Information System), which visualizes the data from the robot controllers in the form of graphs and tables. In this way, it is possible to record over a certain period of time how long a robot has been stationary and whether the cycle times correspond to what has been calculated.
By using this information to adjust the welding production in time, the uptime of welding robots can be increased and everyone, from the shop floor to management, has insight into where the process can still be optimized.
MIS (Management Information System) also runs on a separate server ROSE (Robot Object Server), and can be used both separately and simultaneously with SFC (Shop Floor Control).
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