IONA Monitors CNC Robot Machining Processes

IONA Monitors CNC Robot Machining Processes

Pentaxia, specialised in the manufacturing of advanced composite tooling solutions, prototyping, short-series and volume component production has installed the IONA System developed by INSPHERE Ltd for monitoring robot CNC machining operations.

IONA is a scalable network of sensors providing metrology-grade positional data of automated manufacturing processes. Live positional data from IONA enables robot programs to be updated either periodically or in real-time. The generated data enables users to bring offline programs online seamlessly without the need for manual intervention.

Pentaxia have installed a Kuka robot to perform subtractive CNC machining operations to manufacture composite tooling and foam inserts. The clear end goal is to develop robot CNC machining that is accurate and reliable and can take over relevant operations from more expensive and less flexible 5-axis machine tools.

In the study IONA was able to tolerate the machining environment with no degradation of data quality. It performed within 0.2mm of reference values throughout the 3-week trial and was able to track all robot movements with no line-of-sight challenges. The trial highlighted the system’s unique capabilities to generate live, in-process, metrology-grade data in real-world industrial settings.

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