Saw Robot

Saw Robot is an industrial robot application for natural stone kitchen Countertop industry combining waterjet and saw. It is part of the Stone Automation Oys Intelligent Stone Fabrication Production Lines^TM. Stone Automation Oy is a privately owned company specializing in automated natural stone countertop production line design. The company is founded in September 2005 and it is located in Tampere, Finland. The production line consists of Saw Robot, Edge Robot, ERP software and automatic robot programming software. [ [http://www.stoneautomation.com Stone Automation Oy website] ]

Combining waterjet and saw to one single machine is a fairly novel cutting method. Its purpose is to save material, speed up the cutting process, reduce handcraft and make it possible to cut as many different shapes as possible.

The traditional way to cut natural stone (e.g. Granite, Marble, Zodiaq) kitchen countertops is to first cut long straight edges using a bridge saw and diamond blade. Bridge saw is the fastest method for stone cutting and the out coming seam is smooth. Saw seam needs no further processing before profiling. The main problem in bridge saw is that it may only be used for the cutting of straight lines. In addition the seam of the saw blade with a large radius (e.g. 16") is always longer on the upper surface of the slab than on the bottom producing waste of the valuable stone material.

All the non rectangular shaped countertops containing arcs, splines or L-shaped corners require further cutting. The most common cutting methods for complex shapes are handcraft with small manual grinders, CNC grinding with special grinding pin or waterjet cutting using abrasive. All of these methods are considerably slower and more expensive than a bridge saw. In addition before further processing the pieces must be cut loose from the slab, shift and positioned again under another machine. This increases material waste and predisposes the fragile pieces to cracking.

Combining waterjet and a saw blade to one machine the shifting may be prevented. This machine combination cuts fist all straight seams with saw blade and afterwards uses waterjet to cut all other seams. The waste at the ends of the sawed seams is prevented by cutting the ends with water.

The Stone Automation Oy uses KUKA industrial robot for cutting to achieve higher automation level and to decrease costs compared to conventional CNC machines. The control of CNC machines is usually based on a G-code and the programming interface of commercial CNC machines is often restricted. In most cases this decreases the automation level of the program generation. Industrial robots are generally designed for wider range application and their programming interface is more open. In the case of the Saw Robot the complete program generation is made automatically based on the 2D-CAD image of the countertop pieces and the complete cutting program is moved automatically to the robot controller. [ [http://www.mmsonline.com/articles/080505.html The Changing Face Of CNC Programming] Mark albert, Modern Machine Shop, Aug. 5, 2005] [ [http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/archives/2006/03/robots_vs_cnc_m.html?t=archive Robots vs. CNC Machine Tools: The Software Edge] " David R. Butcher, ThomasNet IndustrialNewsRoom, March 14, 2006]

ee also

*CNC
*Countertop
*Diamond blade
*Dimension stone
*Industrial robot
*Water jet cutter

References