Robot Eases Weighing and Calibrating

The Swiss company Asyril SA built a very compact robot cell. It replaces low added-value manual operations whenever a large amount of samples need to be weighed or pipettes have to be calibrated. The miniaturized robot cell saves space and leaves room for more pallets with products or additional measuring devices. 

Asyril SA is a Swiss company focused on the development of miniaturized mecha¬tronical devices for automation. They realize solutions for the watch industry, assembly of miniature products, high-speed palletizing, surface mount tech¬nology, flexible feeding systems, medical and bio-medical industry. The founders of the company have an excellent record in the design and control of miniaturized robotic systems, such as the PocketDelta for example. This robot won the Swiss Technology Award 2007 and the presti¬gious Hermes Award at the Hannover Fair 2007.

The company received an order from a research laboratory in bio technology for an automatic vial weighing device. The new solution had to replace manual operations whenever a large amount of samples needed to be measured to cali¬brate pipetting systems.

Asyril built a compact table-top cell of 700 x 700 x 700 mm only comprising a Delta robot. The very compact robot cell hosts several palletes of 96 places for vials to check more than one lot without operator intervention. It has a drawer mechanism for in feed and out feed of pallets into the robot cell. This allows convenient and safe handling of pallets. The robot is mounted on top of the casing, which makes cleaning of a work surface easy. Work cycles can be programmed with a simple and intuitive programming language via a user-friendly interface. It can also be turned into an automatic sorting machine, where tight weight tolerances are a must.

The space for the weighing device was very limited. Therefore Asyril decided to use the very small-sized WMC weigh module which has a foot print of only 25 by 50mm. This saves valuable space inside the robot cell to leave room for allocating other measuring devices or more palletes. The WMC has a capacity of 20 g which offers to mount an additional preload for a holding device if needed.

The end customer and Asyril were impressed by the unusual small size and high performance of the WMC weigh module. It allowed them to optimize the interior of the robot cell to leave space for hosting additional equipment in the future.