Aerotech has introduced a new hexapod for quality assurance applications.
As a smaller brother to the HEX500 and HEX300, the HEX150 with a diameter of 150mm and a height of 141mm complements the existing product family diameters of 500 and 300mm. In addition to its commitment to quality assurance in measurement and testing technology, Aerotech also sees potential applications in the automotive, electronics, mechanical engineering and medical technology sectors.
The advantage of the multi-axis, parallel kinematic hexapods is its flexible six degrees of freedom coupled with accurate positioning. With the 132mm outside diameter moving platform, the HEX150 can manipulate loads of up to 10kg with travel ranges of up to 55mm linear and 50 degrees rotation and provides a central through aperture of 35mm diameter.
With its high load-bearing capacity, large movement distances and high positioning speeds of 50mm/s, the hexapod can be specified to a range of applications. The system includes extremely stiff drive legs with brushless, slotless AC servo motors that not only ensure ultimate performance and a long service life, but also maximum precision in the submicrometre range. The AC servo motors are connected directly to the ball bearing spindle, which guarantees high drive rigidity. Fast settling times allow high throughput with repetition accuracy of less than 2μm, the increments of less than 20nm in XYZ and 0.2μrad in Θx Θy Θz also allow a wide range of applications.
The hexapod comes with the control platform A3200. The integrated, intuitive simulation software 'HexGen Hexapod' enables simple programming and control of the hexapods in any user-defined coordinate system. The user can visualise and simulate the available work space in order to carry out collision observations. In addition, the user can also select pre-configured models directly from a stored library with standard designs.
In order to be able to simulate the entire work process, the AS3200 accesses the open platform Coppelia Robotics V-REP via a simulation interface. Complete automation processes can be simulated on this platform, and the required robot actuators, linear or rotary tables and tools can be assembled in a 3D environment.