Cutting it fine

Citation

Loughlin, C. (2008), "Cutting it fine", Industrial Robot, Vol. 35 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2008.04935eaa.001

Cutting it fine

Article Type: Editorial From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 35, Issue 5

Our theme for this issue is “Cutting robots” and we include robots armed with lasers, water-jets, ultrasonic blades, plasma and oxy-gas. A lot of cutting operations are inherently dangerous and so it makes good sense, for human safety reasons if nothing else, to let a robot do the cutting.

The danger comes from the very great difficulty associated with effectively and practically guarding the cutting instrument. There are some operations, such as the cutting of 100 layers of cloth with a reciprocating blade, that have defied all attempts to guard them. Watching someone using the cutting knife while crawling over the stack is enough to make your hair curl.

Other cutting systems can be guarded effectively, but often the guarding hampers the use of the tool to such an extent that it is debatable if it actually adds to safety or adds an additional danger. And it is not unheard of for workers who are being paid piece rate, to find ingenious ways to override the guarding so they can boost their productivity.

Giving cutting jobs to robots ticks all the boxes for “a good idea”. Even leaving safety to one side for a moment, the added precision that robots can offer opens up new possibilities. For example, the carpets in cars used to be either hand cut or pressed out with a complex 3D jig, but now water jet cutting offers the benefit of precision and the option of customization so that extra holes can be cut for ordered accessories, or not cut, as in the pedal holes in automatic rather than manual gear box variants.

Water jet cutting is a serial cutting process whereas a press makes all the cuts in one go – so a robot may not be as fast in this application, but if flexibility is a requirement then robots are pretty hard to beat.

Ultrasonic knives have to be seen to be believed, but these can be wielded relatively safely by a human being and have found wide application in surgery as a replacement for the conventionally bladed scalpel. In the same way that plasma and oxy-gas cutters blow the material away, these blades create very little friction and this lack of opposing force means that very fine blades can be made, which in turn reduces the cutting radius and makes the system even more useful. Further, the greatly reduced friction also means that soft fabrics can be cut more accurately because there is less distortion.

Lasers are also coming on in leaps and bounds with dramatic reductions in price and size. It is somewhat frightening that anyone can now easily purchase over the internet, a pen sized laser pointer that is so powerful it can light a match at twenty paces. This would certainly get your attention at a conference if the speaker set fire to the screen, and leads me to the conclusion that the sooner such devices are only let loose in the hands of robots the better.

Clive Loughlin