Case Study | ALSONTECH3D vision-guided soft package loading in the steel plant

With the change of demographic structure, China's aging degree continues to deepen. At the sametime, the improvement of education level makes young people more willing tochoose high value-added jobs. Dirty and dangerous positions in traditionalmanufacturing industry are difficult to recruit workers. "machinesubstitution" is the trend in manufacturing industry.

There are a large numberof front-line positions with low technical thresholds in the steel industry,and the use of industrial robots to replace workers in positions with harshenvironments and high risk can not only solve the problem of labor shortage,but also improve labor efficiency, reduce the risk of work injuries, ensure thequality of products, and improve the working environment.

Today, we will take youinto the raw material workshop of a steel company, approach thehigh-temperature hot furnace, and see how 3D vision guides the robot tocomplete high-frequency depalletizing operations in harsh working environments.

Harsh Environment

o   There are multiple hot furnaces around the station, and the workingtemperature of the whole workshop is very high, and workers are prone to feeluncomfortable when working in this environment for a long time;

o   The workpiece bin is placed next to the hot furnace, the furnacetemperature is above 1500 °C, and frequent opening and closing is requiredduring sampling, resulting in large changes in station temperature;

o   The raw materials are mainly toner and rice husk mulch, many dust onsite;

o    There is only a light band on the high ceiling, so the scene is verydim;

o    Uninterrupted noise exists on site.

Solution

The site adopts the large FOV scanninggrating 3D camera (AT-S1000-01C-H/AT-S1000-04C), with point cloud processingand AI technology, and runs in parallel with the robot to achieve rapidpositioning and grasping guidance of loose and stacked soft bags.

·   The product has IP65 protection, and has good adaptability to high duston site;

·   Binocular structure design, effectively cope with temperature drift. Thecamera in the range of 0 °C ~ 50 °C continuous work accuracy and stability;

·   Grating structured light solution to meet the user's requirements forhigh cycle time for depalletizing and loading;

·   In the face of low lighting conditions on site, there is no need toerect additional supplementary light measures;

·   Easy to operate, non-professional programmers can easily use the visionsystem through simple training. Low management cost, only need basicmaintenance such as appearance cleaning;

·   The equipment can continuous operated with the robot for 7*24 hours,improve the unit production capacity, and increase the overall ROI.

Project Implementation

The project has been replicated to workstations, helping users improvethe efficiency of front-line workstations. How to make industrial robots havemore perceptual ability, and play an active role in multiple links andscenarios, ALSONTECH's 3D vision can give more solutions.