How Transfer Technology Powers Second-Speed Transformation for Friction Plate Loading & Unloading

Amid the intelligent transformation wave of the manufacturing industry, a leading metal processing enterprise in Hangzhou has partnered with Transfer Technology to realize full-process automated upgrading of friction plate handling, covering grabbing, loading, inspection, unloading and stacking. The project significantly boosts production efficiency and stabilizes overall product quality.

Project Background

Friction plates are core functional components widely used in automotive, mechanical, electronic and other industries, delivering deceleration and braking functions through friction transmission. Featuring complex production procedures and strict quality thresholds, precision inspection of friction plates is essential to ensure product compliance and meet standardized customer requirements.

Conventional loading and unloading for friction plate inspection relies entirely on manual operation, which suffers from low efficiency and frequent workpiece damage during manual handling. To eliminate these operational bottlenecks and upgrade overall production line performance, the customer turned to intelligent automated solutions.

The customer’s production line manufactures more than ten specifications of friction plates via stamping, laser cutting and other processes. The on-site scenario presents multiple technical challenges for automated vision solutions:

• Tightly stacked workpieces require accurate orientation recognition, with strict precision requirements: positioning accuracy ≤ ±2 mm and angle accuracy ≤ ±2°;

• Two core specifications feature pure black surfaces, which pose great difficulties for visual identification. Meanwhile, the workstation is affected by complex ambient light interference;

• Workpieces placed on wooden trays are prone to tilting and slight deformation;

• The production line runs at a compact rhythm, requiring an average single-piece handling cycle time within 5 seconds.

Transfer Technology Solution

Tailored to on-site production characteristics and core demands, Transfer Technology, cooperating with system partners, launched an integrated solution equipped with Epic Eye S-M 3D camera, self-developed vision software, industrial robot and dedicated gripper. The 3D vision system achieves high-precision workpiece recognition and guides the robotic arm to complete full-cycle automatic loading and unloading.

Overall Workflow

1.Stacked friction plates are transported to the inspection workstation. The Epic Eye S-M 3D camera captures full-scene point cloud data of all workpieces within the field of view.

2.The vision software analyzes point cloud data to accurately identify the precise position and pose of each friction plate, intelligently calculates the optimal picking point and robot motion path, and guides automated loading and unloading operations.

3.The robotic arm picks workpieces from the tray and places them on the inspection platform at a unified standard angle. After quality inspection is completed, the robot neatly stacks the qualified workpieces on the designated tray.

Project Highlights

01 Accurate Recognition of Black Workpieces

Black workpieces have low surface reflectivity and inconspicuous feature information, which has long been a universal challenge for industrial vision recognition. Adopting optimized imaging and algorithm processing technologies, Transfer Technology’s 3D camera delivers stable and reliable recognition for black friction plates. It effectively avoids recognition errors and missing detections, eliminating rework, material waste and economic losses caused by visual recognition failures.

02 Excellent Anti-Interference & Environmental Adaptability

The system features powerful ambient light resistance and adapts to complex and variable on-site lighting conditions with stable recognition performance. It eliminates the need for additional shading equipment and subsequent maintenance costs, ensuring long-term continuous and stable operation of the production line and improving overall operational efficiency.

03 High Compatibility & Scalable Production Capacity

The vision system achieves stable adaptation to over ten types of friction plate specifications. It supports rapid model iteration and one-click deployment for new products, with strong scalability, fully meeting the customer’s demands for flexible production and continuous product line expansion.

04 Significant Production Efficiency Improvement

Handling cycle time is the core factor restricting the efficiency of inspection and sorting lines. After automated upgrading, the single-piece loading and unloading cycle is controlled within 5 seconds, and the independent vision recognition cycle reaches less than 2 seconds. The second-level ultra-fast response thoroughly optimizes the production rhythm, greatly improves line throughput, and builds solid competitive advantages for the customer’s production operations.