The long arm from above 

Yaskawa under­pins its claim to offer a full range of robot mod­els for every appli­ca­tion with the Motoman GP-Shelftype series. The range now includes five robot mod­els with extend­ed down­ward reach, e.g. for ele­vat­ed place­ment on steel frames or brack­ets. This allows work­pieces to be removed from above and cre­ates floor space under­neath the robot for fix­tures, tool changes and part transfers. 

In addi­tion to the clas­sic con­sole robots Motoman GP165R and GP200R, which are often used in the auto­mo­tive indus­try (body con­struc­tion or press chains), the com­pa­ny offers spe­cial mod­els with an excep­tion­al­ly high max­i­mum reach of 4 meters (GP120RL) or with par­tic­u­lar­ly high pay­loads of up to 400 kg (GP300R, GP400R). Despite these impres­sive key fig­ures, the robots impress with their slim design and low dead weight. 

This robot series was devel­oped for con­sole mount­ing, which means that the manip­u­la­tors can reach very far below them­selves and work below their instal­la­tion lev­el. The already large action space of these Motoman robots can, of course, be extend­ed enor­mous­ly still fur­ther by means of trav­el paths or swings, for exam­ple for inter­linked mul­ti-machine load­ing sys­tems over large areas. The valu­able instal­la­tion space below the robot remains free for large machines (e.g. CNC machin­ing and cut­ting machines, injec­tion mold­ing machines), tools or con­vey­or sys­tems that can­not be recessed into the floor.

Like all Yaskawa robots in the uni­ver­sal GP series, the robots in the Shelftype series are con­trolled by the com­pact MOTOMAN YRC1000 high-per­for­mance con­troller. This pro­vides a vari­ety of impor­tant func­tions for inte­gra­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion or func­tion­al safe­ty monitoring. 

Anoth­er very inter­est­ing fea­ture is the abil­i­ty to pro­gram the robots direct­ly and seam­less­ly via inte­grat­ed PLC func­tion blocks — in the famil­iar pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment, elim­i­nat­ing the need for a robot programmer. 

The first users are already using robots from the new Shelftype series. For exam­ple, the machine builder and process opti­miz­er Hein­rich Georg GmbH, head­quar­tered in Kreuz­tal in the north­ern Siegerland region of Ger­many, is suc­cess­ful­ly using them in its pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties to stack large sheet met­al com­po­nents for trans­former core production.