Research On The Key Technology Of The Water Heater Tank Flexible Automatic Assembly Line

In the traditional electric water heater tank assembly line, assembly work is completed by manual. Therefore, the labor intensity of workers is large, the production efficiency is low. With the implementation of the machine substitutions, tank automated assembly is the direction of development of production of electric water heater. The industrial robot and its corresponding terminal execution device and a vision sensor device are combined and reasonable layout to form a flexible automatic assembly line of the water heater tank in this paper, and the key technology of the assembly line are studied in detail. The main work contains:(1) Theselection and layout of flexible automatic assembly line.The selection and layout of taking-putting tank system, patting lug system and turning system have been studied, the terminal execution deviceof industrial robotwas designed, and the related equipment was chosen.(2) The design of taking-putting tank vision system. In the image processing, firstly, the image mask is used to isolate a part of the image obtained by CCD camera,a median filter is used to process the gray images, the maximum between class variance is adopted to segment an image into different regions of interests,and then use morphological processing, finally complete feature recognition. A kind of distance transformation circle detection method is put forward,throughthe detection of maximum inscribed circle of target characteristics judge whether it exists,and then judge the type ofthe tank. This paper proposed a color pattern matching methodbased on HLS space, match in color image directly and complete quality detection of the tank.Combined with MATLAB to analyse image information, and use OpenCV, VC++ to design image software system.(3) The design of taking-putting tank control system. Using PLC to implement the integrated control of taking-putting tank system. Combining with the working process of taking-putting tanks, the overall scheme of the control system is designed.The type of PLC is determinedbased on the input and output points. According to the specific control requirements, complete the design of PLC control program.(4) The design of industrial robotconveyor line tracking. Through the encoder,synchronous switch and accompanying software realize synchronous motion of industrial robot and transmission line, taking the tank in the process of convey line movement.(5)The design of patting lug system and turning system. In the SolidWorks software, the modeling and Simulation of the patting lug system is carried out, and the structure design of the patting lug system is finished. The design of turning system includes structure design of industrial robot terminal execution device and cylinder selection, friendly man-machine interface design and industrial robot program design and path planning.The water heater tank flexible automatic assembly line successfully achieve the automatic installation of the tanks with a reliable system stability, a reasonable layout, an accurate detection results and reduce the labor intensive while improving the working efficiency. The system has been put into use in a water heaters company.