Sam "the Robot Man" and Mr. Kozaka demo a fully automated CNC lathe built around a Fanuc CRX20 robot that changes collets, swaps tools, and handles workpieces without human help. The system runs lights-out with limit switches and sensors, and scales to any shop floor with unlimited tool counts.
Hi everybody. This is Sam the Robot Man. I'm here at Mex Kanaza with Mr. Kozaka from Takamatsu Machinery. He's from the design department and well, I wouldn't be Sam the Robot man if I didn't love my robots. And this is a bloody awesome setup we've got right here. Check this out. We've got the mighty Fanuc CRX20 here, 20 kilo capacity Cobot. But the really amazing thing here is what's actually going on. You probably see, wow, there's like a piston here and, and a lot going on inside. But we have Mr. Kaka here to actually explain. So I'm going to jump into Japanese and we're going to have a little bit of a chat about what's actually going on here. Foreign. You can see it's about to change the collet out. As you can see we have an array of different hands for work material handling, collet change. You can just zoom in here. We're actually changing this collet out so that the face plate is coming off. The robot is going to place it down here very elegantly. As you can see, we have limit switches and sensors everywhere just to make sure that everything is working as it should. So if you want a complete lights out machine, this is the way to do it. Work holding, tooling, material, handling machine, tending everything in one package. And as you can see, this is just a dummy machine. The reason they've done it this way is we can hook this up to pretty much anything. So let us know what you need here. But we can see the collet has just come out. That's going to go into this fixture here. So this is a 20mm fixture. And we're changing over to a 30mm collet here. Wow, isn't that something? Have a look there, into the collet face. So just imagine at your shop you've got a lot of variety, a lot of changeover. No worries, we've got your handle here, we can automate the works. Isn't she a beauty? There goes the hand that's going to go back, grab the plate and then after that we're off to the races again to machine more parts. So we're demoing right here with two collets. But if you can imagine, you could have an array of other collet fixtures here and the opportunities here are endless really. So what we're seeing here is really the next step in the evolution of machine tending. Up until this stage, I think we've all seen work being handed in and out of a machine. But now we're actually doing collet changes. And we also have the ability to change the tools on the turret as well with Captor fixturing. So hopefully we'll be able to see that in a moment, too. Here we go. Here's a capto tool, and that's about to be placed into the turret. So, originally, you may have felt as though you were limited to, you know, maybe eight to 12 tools on your turret. Not anymore. You can have as many as you want, just lay them out in the fixture in front of the machine. And as you can imagine, we could always have a table here to put the work pieces on. We could put a camera there if you need some vision picking integrated into that system too. So if you want a 100% lights out machine, we've got you covered here. What a beautiful machine.
