Calibrating a Bending Cell

In order to create true-to-life simulations, and effective NC programs, MRobot must use a true-to-life representation during bending cell calibration.

For example, if an end product must achieve a tolerance of 0.1mm, MRobot‘s representation of the cell manufacturing the product must be within this tolerance. This is often difficult to achieve, even using advanced measuring tools. To overcome this problem MRobot uses a two-tier system for exact location of the cell’s components:

• The initial tier is Positioning places the components according to a layout supplied by the system integrator, or simply by using a tape measure. This provides a precision of about 0.5mm, which is good enough for finding bending solutions and testing the cell.
• The second tier is Calibration uses the robot to sample specific positions on the components, and integrating these measurements into MRobot‘s system. This means that the representation of the cell in MRobot has the same precision as can be achieved by the robot. A calibrated robot gives a calibrated representation and therefore accurate NC.

The calibration results are only as good as the data used for it, so precise tool positioning and point sampling are paramount.

Our calibration procedure is patented under the name CaliBright^® and can only be used if you purchased the corresponding Metalix license.

Using a Calibration Block and a Calibration pointer to calibrate the Orientation Table