I have an application where I am machine tending. The stock in this case is angle material that is 3" x 3" angle, 4" long. I am planning to stack my material like the image below. My question is, what is the easiest/best way to handle the offset when depalletizing. When I setup the grid with layers, it simply will move to the next layer by moving down. In this case, I need to move down and over slightly. Can I do with with a pallet, grid and a single pattern? Or would I need to make multiple patterns within the pallet for the offset? The material thickness is .25" so the offset isn’t a lot.
I’d probably let the palletizing handle going from one stack to the next, and just programmatically modify the “pick” waypoint to be different each time. Using the pose_add() command to get it to shift down and over. Then the palletization just moves to that waypoint each time, but you’ve sort of “manually” shifted it where you want it to be. Just remember to reset the value back to the unaltered position when the stack has been fully depalletized.
This could also be done fairly easily using loops and Features. 2 nested loops, each running 4 iterations. The inner loop moves the waypoint in and over 4 times, the outer loop shifts the Feature over to the next stack location and resets the inner loop’s iteration.
I was able to get this worked out pretty easily. I created a pallet and used a reference feature ( point in space). I created the pallet with 1 layer. I then simply offset the reference feature by the amount that I needed to move over and down. Of course, some extra stuff in there for a layer count, reset, etc… but it works really well.
Are you able to do a move until tool contact to find the parts? It might be a bit slower overall but it would be easier for starting with a partial stack if that was required.
