Optidrive automates production of embroidery stones

At Rébillon there was a great need for industrial automation. That's why Official KUKA System Partner Optidrive came up with an automation concept with no less than 3 KUKA robots.

Rébillon was founded in 1953 in Britain, France. Her core business in the beginning consisted of producing granite gravestones. Because Rébillon came into financial difficulties, they were bought by Gagneraud a few years ago. This is a French group active in infrastructure work. They saw the potential that Rébillon had to offer and therefore didn’t hesitate to invest in this opportunity. Since the takeover, Rébillon has been mainly active in the production of products from Breton granite for public works, such as embroidery stones.

Necessity of Industrial Automation

Embroidery stones must be roughly produced in their production process. If they are too smooth, there is a high risk that people can slip and fall.Originally, Rébillon used a blasting installation that worked on the basis of Inox spheres. However, the cost per running meter is very high when using this technique. Because the Breton granite, with which Rébillon has years of experience, is also suitable to flame, it was decided to automate this process industrially.

An industrial automation solution with Optidrive

Official KUKA System Partner Optidrive has developed name and fame in the stone industry. Because of their previous successful collaborations with the company Breton from Italy, Rébillon decided to work with Optidrive to automate this process in an industrial way.

Optidrive came up with a concept for Rébillon in which no less than 3 KUKA robots were integrated. The first robot is a KR 700 PA palletizing robot. This robot is responsible for picking up the stones (max 500 kg) at the input and placing them at the mill / sawing robot. Then it moves the stones to the flame robot and then palletizes them.

The KR 700 PA robot is responsible for lifting the stones.

For the second automation application Raf Dequeker, General Manager of Optidrive, chose a KR 240 R2500 Prime robot from the Quantec series. This robot is responsible for sawing the bevel or milling the rounding on the stones. The third KUKA robot is a KR 10 R1420 robot from the CYBERTECH nano series who moves with flames over the stone surface. As a result of the temperature shock, flakes are released of the surface and this creates an anti-slip layer.

Flexible automation as a condition

This industrial automation application had the difficult challenge that all stones vary in length, cross-section and for the curves in the street, stones are used that follow this curvature. It was therefore crucial for Rébillon that the robot installation is flexible. The installation now works fully automatically and almost completely unmanned. This allowed Rébillon to increase the capacity to 2 minutes per embroidery or 30 minutes per pallet with an average of 15 meters of embroidery.

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