With this new solution, KUKA Safe Handling Casting axis, KUKA Roboter, European market leader in industrial automation with the aid of robots, has responded to a recurrent topic in foundries: In prototype, pre-series and small-series production the robot until now was at a disadvantage compared to the performance of humans with their wide horizon of experience and flexibility. This meant that to date the programming of robot movements and influencing variables demanded a great deal of know-how. This was too laborious for small production volumes, and was just plain uneconomical. This view prevailed, despite the robot’s advantages of being able to perform exactly the same motions, untiringly and continuously repeated, guaranteeing a high degree of consistency in product quality (and thus less scrap). And quite ignoring the fact that robots relieve people of monotonous work that could be damaging to health. KUKA Roboter has applied itself to exactly this point, and together with the company ROBOTEC - based on its Flexcast system - has developed the KUKA Safe Handling Casting axis.
The casting axis is particularly suitable for sand casting and permanent mold casting. It can however also be used for many other applications.

The chief attraction of the new KUKA foundry robot is that the foundryman can guide the robot manually thanks to the KUKA Safe Handling robot technology.

The foundryman uses a joystick to guide the robot safely through all the necessary motions, including the pouring curve itself; exactly as if he were performing the operation himself. This means: The foundryman teaches all points of the motion path, using the joystick, right through to actually pouring the aluminum. A simple system based on practical experience and requiring no programming. The path and pouring curve are simply saved after the operation has been completed, and can be repeated in production.