Essen/Augsburg, September 2009 – Welding, cutting, stamping, bending, drilling, joining, milling, handling, monitoring, measuring, folding; polishing pot lids, sharpening knives. No matter what processes are to be mastered, KUKA has a solution for the metal industry. Today fenders, tomorrow facades, the next day steel tubing. The versatility of KUKA robots makes them interesting for any type of metalworking application.
Tiring working conditions are commonplace in the metalworking industry. Fully alert 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – no problem for a KUKA robot.
Welding, using a wide range of different technologies, is one of the most frequent tasks in the metalworking sector. The ability to achieve consistently perfect seam quality combined with enormously high process velocities and, not least, flexibility without new investment: that is what has made KUKA robots indispensable in the automotive industry. Here, for example, robots weld doors, roof seams and trunk lids.
However, bending metal is at least as demanding as welding. The main difference: the robot does not usually perform the bending itself, but feeds the tubes or metal panels to a bending center. The most common tasks for robots in automated bending processes are thus material supply, machine tending and palletizing.
In addition to these two main fields of application, the use of robots is conceivable for all process steps in the metal industry. There are many factors in favor of the use of robots: occupational health and safety, requirements for consistent quality, reproducibility, increased productivity and availability, flexible logistics and, of course, reduced costs.
KUKA Roboter GmbH has set up a wide-ranging, competent Key Technology Management for the metalworking industry. The technological pioneer from Augsburg has a broad network of integrators and system partners in this industry. This successful cooperation with industry specialists enables the company to address the individual requirements of every customer and offer flexible solutions. KUKA reacts to the requirements of the metal sector and tries to implement all suggestions.
Particularly in the metal industry, human-machine cooperation is of great importance. With its “Safe Robot” technology, KUKA offers the human worker the reassurance of being able to move around safely in the safety zone of the robot and to work with the robot hand in hand. KUKA robots thus facilitate more efficient utilization of the work capacity of the employees for value-adding tasks.