Together with Infaimon, the company demonstrated to attending businesses the benefits of applying “Bin Picking”, an automated system for extracting and handling industrial parts using machine vision.
Pamplona, 1 July 2015. Bildu Lan, a company specialising in the manufacture of custom special-purpose machinery for industrial processes, presented this morning, together with its strategic partner Infaimon, a pioneering machine-vision solution for “Bin Picking”. This process enables industrial parts to be handled automatically and in an organised manner using a robot and 3D vision integrated into the robot gripper. Machine vision, also known as computer vision, is a field of artificial intelligence. The aim of the technique is to program a robot to “understand” a scene, process or image characteristics and use that information to manipulate the part. The presentation was attended by companies from different sectors both within and outside the region, including Gestamp (Navarre), Edscha (Santander), Irudi (Biscay), KYBSE (Navarre), SNA (Gipuzkoa), Miasa (Navarre) and Tutti Pasta (Navarre).
Bildu Lan and Infaimon, both specialists in machine vision, combined their expertise on this occasion to integrate and offer this technology for the improvement and automation of industrial processes in Navarre. “In industry there is a growing need to handle industrial parts in complex environments, such as extracting parts from inside containers (bin picking),” explains Pablo García, Bildu Lan sales engineer. “We are presenting a Bin Picking solution capable of detecting different industrial parts in containers, identifying which parts can be handled and extracting them accurately. The system determines the coordinates of the parts and sends them to an industrial robot for handling,” García adds.
Benefits of Bin Picking
The benefits of this automation process include higher productivity, improved operator health and safety when handling heavy and hazardous parts, higher machine-utilisation rates and a reduced need for additional machines to achieve the required plant production volumes. The technique optimises production-process operations and minimises the resources required for maintenance, thereby improving competitiveness and process quality. The aim is to make “a cutting-edge application available to Navarre’s industrial sector so that companies can take a leading position in the use of the most advanced technologies,” said Pablo García.
About Bildu Lan
Bildu Lan, based in Torres de Elorz, was founded in 1973 as a worker cooperative and specialises in the manufacture of special-purpose machinery to automate its customers’ production processes. Its customers include mainly multinational companies in the automotive and food industries, such as Viscofan, Gestamp, Kayaba, Grupo Antolín and Edscha, among others. At the time, the company had a workforce of 39 employees and forecast turnover of €4.5 million for 2015.