Gantry Crane

Industrial automation deals primarily with automation of manufacturing, quality control and material handling processes. Gantry system is one of the pioneer platforms in industrial material handling systems. The objective of this work is to design and develop the part handling units of a gantry automation system. Different part handling units like End-of-arm, Input Conveyor with Tilting Unit, Rotary Orientation Station and Transverse Conveyor with Tilting Unit have been designed, manufactured and deployed in the gantry automation system that facilitates automatic loading and unloading of wheel hub component during CNC operation. These part handling units are custom designed to meet the customer requirements for production line that consists of 2 Vertical Machining Centres that performs drilling operation in flange down condition of the wheel hub component and 1 Vertical Machining Centre that performs tapping operation in flange up condition of the wheel hub component. In this gantry automation system, first design is carried out as per customer requirements then assembly process is carried out with electrical wiring as per design, then gantry is made to automatically pick and place the wheel hub component using controlling unit and PLC software from one station to other and the machined component is placed on top of the output conveyor as the last operation in gantry system. The main objective behind this work is to reduce the material handling time of the wheel hub component during the machining operations and to increase productivity.