In the past, the automotive industry has always been the most important field of robot application. With the improvement of automation demand, the application of industrial robots has been greatly expanded. In addition to traditional welding applications, robots have also been widely used in machine tool loading and unloading, material handling and stacking, grinding, spraying, assembly and other fields. Metal forming machine tool is an important part of machine tools. Forming processing is usually associated with high labor intensity, noise pollution and metal dust. Sometimes it is in a high temperature, high humidity and even polluted environment. The work is simple and boring, and it is difficult for enterprises to recruit people. The integration of industrial robot and forming machine tool can not only solve the employment problem of enterprises, but also improve the processing efficiency and safety, improve the processing accuracy, and has a great development space.

There are two main ways of robot bending integration application. First, with the bending machine as the center, the robot is equipped with vacuum suction cups, and the magnetic force is divided into feeding frame, positioning table, blanking table and turnover frame to form a bending unit. The second is the flexible plate processing line formed by robot and laser equipment or NC turntable punch, industrial robot walking shaft, sheet metal transmission line, positioning table and vacuum suction cup gripper. Using the technology and platform of robot control system and machine tool NC system, seamless connection can be realized, bending software package can be developed, and closed-loop control can be realized for robot material support in the bending process. Under different bending speeds, the robot realizes automatic matching and complete tracking.

There are two main ways for the integrated application of robot and press stamping. First, single robot stamping loading and unloading: the sheet metal is moved from the destacking platform to the positioning platform by the robot, and then transferred to the press die for stamping. After stamping, the sheet metal is taken by the robot and put into the stacking platform to realize the automatic loading and unloading of single press robot. Second, robot stamping connection: establish stamping connection between multiple presses through multiple robots. According to the requirements of workpiece forming process, it is necessary to cooperate with multiple presses. The whole production line is composed of destacking robot, feeding robot, transmission and handling robot between presses and tail line robot. Compared with the manipulator with linear coordinates, the industrial robot is more flexible, has no high requirements for molds, and is easy to integrate.

Hot die forging production line usually consists of two die forging presses, one for stamping and the other for trimming. The integrated application of hot die forging robot is usually equipped with two robots. One is responsible for transferring the high-temperature materials treated by the medium frequency furnace to the stamping die forging press, and the other is responsible for taking materials from the stamping die forging press and transferring them to the other die forging press for edge cutting. In order to prevent the high-temperature stamping workpiece from sticking to the die, it is necessary to lubricate the die after each stamping. The lubrication can be completed by robot or special organization.

Welding is the subsequent process of sheet metal processing of forming machine tools. Robot welding has two types: resistance welding and arc welding. The application of welding robot accounts for more than 40% of the whole robot application. The application of arc welding takes the robot as the core, and the welding workstation is composed of welding machine, wire feeder, welding gun, tooling fixture, etc. The application of resistance welding takes the robot as the core, and the spot welding workstation is composed of spot welding gun, welding controller, water and gas unit, pipeline package, tooling fixture, etc.

Robot is a typical representative of advanced manufacturing technology and automation equipment. Intelligent industrial equipment has become the basis for the upgrading and transformation of global manufacturing industry. The integrated application of industrial robots and CNC machine tools makes intelligent manufacturing, digital workshop and intelligent factory from concept to reality.