Andrew Pearce Bowls

Setting the way points for the sanding patterns is really simple,” says Alex Drew, application engineer at Andrew Pearce Bowls. “You just set your corners and then decide your speeds and your pattern, hit play and it goes

Andrew Pearce Bowls added a vacuum table controlled by the digital inputs and outputs in the cobot controller. When the boards are brought over to the UR5e cobot, they have been pre-sanded slightly and sprayed with water to raise the grain in order for the cobot to finish sand them. The UR5e picks the board from the infeed, places it on a vacuum table, sands top, sides, and breaks the edges. From there, it brings it to a flip jig, nudges the board a bit, and flips it over 45 degrees so that board can be accessed from the bottom.  The cobot then brings the board back to the vacuum table and finishes the other side before stacking it in an outfeed pile. Depending on the size of the board, the cycle varies anywhere from six to seven and a half minutes. 

The grooves of the cutting boards are sanded with a spindle that easily replaces the orbital sander on the cobot. “We 3D printed a tool bracket that allowed us to hold a spindle onto the robot, sanding grooves that the regular orbital sander couldn’t fit,” says Mike Welch, production manager at Andrew Pearce Bowls. “We simply pulled the drawings of the UR plate mount off the UR website, placed them into our CAD program to 3D print whatever bracket we needed. Instead of buying a version that was going to cost us upwards of $10,000, we were able to do that in-house for $200.”

“Within the teach pendant itself, it’s very easy to program in the peripherals of the robot,” says, explaining how both the sander and the vacuum gripper have their own URCaps (software handshakes between peripherals and UR cobot arm), which makes it very simple to program, fine-tune and adjust the cobot end-effectors. “If you want to wire in little air components through the digital inputs and outputs, that’s as easy as putting in a node for on and off.”

The UR5e cobot from Universal Robots has a 5kg payload and a reach of 850mm, the team at Andrew Pearce Bowls has outfitted the cobot with the Airpick gripper and Sanding Kit from Robotiq, both UR+ certified to integrate seamlessly with UR cobots.

Using Old World techniques, Andrew Pearce Bows is the nation’s largest producer of hand-turned bowls, processing full truckloads of logs all the way from the raw goods to the finished product.

The company utilizes the entire log to minimize waste, a result of this approach are the cutting boards the company produces in many shapes and sizes.

“Being a small company and a state with a small population pool, we actively look to promote within our ranks,” says Mike Welch, production manager at Andrew Pearce Bowls. “A lot of employees strive to be bowl turners, so when a position opened up, one of our sanders was interested in learning to turn, so we gave him the opportunity. That however left a shortage in the finish sanding; we’ve looked hard and long to fill that position—unsuccessfully—and turned ultimately to adding a Universal Robot instead.”