This morning I got a call from our production team that started out with “You’re gonna want to see this.” That kind of call can go one of two ways. When I got out there, what I found was definitely on the “good” end of that spectrum.
The conveyor they showed me was one that’s getting ready to ship. It’s an accumulating conveyor for one of our OEM partners that’s received several enhancements from our engineering team.
It’s a mostly-standard AS40 Automation Series conveyor. Lane dividers have been added to help guide the product to the drive end of the conveyor, where a special UHMW “nest” was been placed. It’s designed to fit the product perfectly and holds it in place until a robot can pick it up and move it on to the next step of the operation; other pieces accumulate behind it. An extra bar has been added between the lane dividers that keeps the product from stacking up vertically while it’s accumulating.
This is the kind of “special” our engineering team handles on a regular basis, since many of the projects we work on have some sort of complexity that needs a little more than is available from a completely standard conveyor.
