Solara Automation's customer produces portable bandsaw blades. Solara's engineers faced the challenge of creating an automation cell responsible for feeding the raw material, shaping the blade into a loop, welding the ends together, annealing the seam, and grinding it.

Solara designed and constructed a three-robot cell for this operation. The blade material is fed in on reels and shaped accurately by looping. To ensure precise blade alignment, the vision system captures images of the blade ends, and the position data is utilized to fine-tune the independent gripping of each blade end by the robot.

The robot then transfers the blade to one of two welder heads. To enable uninterrupted production, a rotary table was incorporated, allowing one welder to be used while the other underwent cleaning. Following welding, the blade is moved to an annealing station.

Following the annealing process, the second transfer robot moves the blade to one of two grinding stations. To maintain the cycle rate, two grinding stations are employed. This arrangement allows the grinding robot to operate continuously, grinding while the transfer robot handles loading and unloading at the grinding stations. The grinder robot and grind stations equipped with 3-position blade tensioners seamlessly collaborate to ensure access to all 4 sides of weld seams, enhancing efficiency and precision.