Automated Preplating System | Streamlined Component Delivery for Trusses

Hey guys, it's Peter. We're here in Centralia, Washington at The Truss Company. And I'm here with Chad from Sawtooth Robotics. And we're going to show you a very unique system. What this system actually does is it takes the truss members and the cord members and it pre-plates them and delivers them on conveyor systems to the production teams where it's organized already and they just pull them right off the conveyor and start building the trusses. So our system starts out with the manual board, MBEAD, also known as the MBI. The MBI is where you're going to be able to optimize cutting and then store boards, up to 12 boards into the system, and they'll automatically load in when each board is called for by the system. The board loading infeed screen is where the operator's going to be able to look up, validate which boards they need to load, the orientation and the order, and then load them onto the MBI in that order so that the system can run. This is the board infeed. Boards come in, get grabbed by the carriages, and then run through the infeed, measured as they're going through to validate the length, as they go to the pre-plater. This is the heart of our system. This is where the magic is done. The pre-plate robot grabs nail plates, places them onto the hand-off stations, where the press robot grabs them and sticks them into the press, where the nail plates are pressed into the boards and taken down to the outfeed. This is our outfeed robot. Our outfeed robot picks from the pick point where the carriage drops off the board and places it on the outfeed conveyors, where boards are then conveyed down to the jig so the operators can remove them. With servo drives, these drive the boards to exact locations so robots can place nail plates on them and pick them and place them onto the outfeed conveyors. Through the control pendant, an operator is able to extend out the outfeed so that they can remove the materials from the outfeed without getting off and on the table. At this point, operators will be removing bottom and top cords, placing them out on the table. After they get all the cords done, they'll grab the webs, get those into place, hammer them in, roll it, and then eject out the truss. As simple as that.