Robotic Pick and Place

A client came to us with a process that needed a great solution. They had a process that required medical needles to be picked individually from a bundle and placed into a cleaning solution. Since production was ramping up, they needed a quick and reliable way to achieve this. What resulted was a clean and efficient solution utilizing the Epson Intelliflex system.

The Intelliflex consists of a hopper into which parts are loaded, a shaker which is monitored by a vision system, and a SCARA robot to do the pick and place. Needles are poured into the hopper in the rear of the machine. They are then fed onto the shaking table in small bundles. The vision system monitors the shaking table and identifies which needles can be grabbed individually by the magnetic end effector and place those into a selection queue. The robot then grabs them individually and places them onto the conveyor which drops the needles into the cleaning solution.

The end result was a system that could pick individual needles with a cycle time of around 2.5-4 seconds depending on the size of needle. The Epson Intelliflex system was the perfect choice because it was able to accommodate many different parts in one single system without any tooling changes.