PILZ Safe Automation surprised visitors to last year’s National Manufacturing Week with the launch of the world’s first vision based 3D zone guarding system, SafetyEye. Now the technology has been adapted for press brake guarding, with the release of PSENvip (Vision in Parallel).
Pilz has taken an unusual approach to the development of press brake guarding. Its competitors released products much earlier, with Lazersafe marketing the first laser-based press brake guarding system in 2000, followed by Sick in 2006, with the first image-based system.
While Lazersafe and Sick were applying sensors to guard the limited danger zones of press brakes (several square millimetres), Pilz was developing SafetyEye for much larger three-dimensional zones including entire robot cells. To many industry insiders, it appeared an overly-ambitious project, until Pilz successfully demonstrated SafetyEye at trade shows worldwide in 2007. The SafetyEye is now gathering commercial support in Australia, with Sage Automation placing the first local order on a SafetyEye system at Melbourne’s National Manufacturing Week last year.
The new PSENvip press brake guarding system boasts the same technology contained in SafetyEye, Pilz Australia’s managing director, Frank Schrever told FEN.
“Pilz has been working on the complicated SafetyEye system for almost a decade, and we realised there could be a spin off. We saw that the same imaging chip we used in the Safety Eye could easily be adapted to this press brake system,” Schrever said.
With its “parallel vision” optical system, the PSENvip protection and measuring system is completely insensitive to optical influences such as surface reflections, reflection bypass, external light or diffused light. Thanks to the high optical resolution PSENvip safely detects the smallest of objects, down to two millimetres.
PSENvip has three zones — front, centre and rear — and boasts a scanning range of 10m — exceeding any other press brake guarding system on the market. This makes it also potentially suitable for use on long folder machines, which have been notoriously difficult to guard, according to Schrever.
“People can lose fingers on long folders, because there can be two or three men holding the floppy sheet of metal, but often just one man operating the pedal. As the top beam of the long folder comes down to clamp the sheet, it can take a person’s fingers off,” he said.
Pilz is now adapting PSENvip for use on long folders as well. Schrever is also heralding the development of a real-time bending angle measurement system for PSENvip.
“Using our imaging, we will be able to give a numerical read out of bending angle in real-time. This will be retrofittable to PSENvip by the second quarter of this year,” Schrever said.
The first exhibition demonstration of PSENvip in Australia will be at Safety in Action, Melbourne, in April. Sydneysiders can catch the new system on display at National Manufacturing Week in May.
www.pilz.com.au
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