SQP Engineering, Western Australia

About the project

SQP Engineering is a highly regarded supplier of precision machined products in Bibra Lake, WA. SQP boasts a team of highly talented and experienced tradesmen led by the husband and wife team of David and Heidi Miller. SQP stands for Service, Quality and Products, as those are the principles and objectives the company was founded upon and continue to be led by. SQP have had a long and prosperous relationship with Okuma Australia, having installed a fleet of Okuma’s high quality CNC lathes and mills tools over a steady growth phase that is in to its second decade. To gain the most out of SQP’s most recent addition, the Okuma LB4000 lathe, Automated Solutions Australia was chosen to install and commission a robotic tending system that allows the machine to run unattended for long production runs,

Robot type used

A Fanuc R2000iC/125L robot was installed and commissioned with an ATI gripper changeover  device that allows the robot to change from one gripper to another as required by the specific product being produced. A 3 jaw gripper is used for handling billet parts while a 2 jaw gripper is used for handling bar stock. The system is designed to use pallets with changeable profiles for easy arrangement and location of blank parts. Machined parts are returned to the pallets and can be replenished during production. Bar stock enters the cell through a bar feeder or through an inclined feeder and exits the cell through a decline chute. The cell controller incorporates ASA’s easy to use robotic machine tending interface which allows the user to simply program new products by entering some basic setup dimensions and saving those for future selection. The system incorporates a database that stores different pallet configurations and product configurations so recalling them in future requires simply choosing the product from a  dropdown list.

Benefits to the customer

The key benefits of this system are quick setup and run times, intuitive control removes the need for onsite robot expertise, long unmanned production runs and the flexibility to add supplementary tasks such as parts washing, deburring or assembly if those opportunities arise.