Separating of steel rods with the selector SL-1

The separation of individual steel rods out of a bundle is a well known problem in the steel industry. Manually performed, this work is strenuous and slow, with a high risk of injury-only an automated process is able to meet the requirements of economic efficiency, plant availability and operational safety. In this paper a fully automatic solution developed by ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH is presented. This solution mainly consisting of a gantry robot system equipped with an external sensor system for rod recognition. Beside a description of the system components and the operation principle, the paper gives some details about the operational parameters of the system. Two of the rod selectors described in the paper are in permanent operation at one Austrian steel production company.