Linear track/positioner for welding robot

Welding robots are very useful, but when it comes to large parts (like welding an entire trailer base), any 6-axis robot won't have the reach. In order to be able to carry out large and complex projects, the company asked me to develop a scalable track that would be easy and inexpensive to produce at the company's facilities and install at the end user. A 3 m long section with a standard layout has a load capacity of up to 500 kg per platform. The 1.6kW motor is mounted through a 1:5 gearbox on a plate that has a pivot point, allowing the entire motor to be rotated to precisely adjust the gap between the pinion and rack. Thus, if you also stuff a cabinet with robot drivers and a welding machine onto this train on separate platforms, you can ride very long distances carrying only a power cable and, perhaps, a cable for the emergency stop button. Although the dynamics characteristics are standard (1 m/s acceleration up to 1.5 m/s^2), which is even more than is needed for welding tasks, and this is more than dangerous when the weight of a welding robot with a platform is up to 350 kg, so massive limiters were made on each side. However, the track was designed to accommodate much heavier robots like palletizers. The typical load was simulated through FEA and a multiple safety margin was made, since the weight problem is not critical for this product. Sheet metal was specially chosen as the basis, since this company also specializes in plasma and laser cutting and the cost of this type of construction was even cheaper than pipes or ready-made profiles. All key surfaces have been milled for greater precision and no unbalanced loads. And the possibilities that building the track from scratch gave us was making it possible to create a cable chain in the middle of the track, integrate protective covers and holes for cable routing, and add multiple holes for all of them at once when cutting out the plates. Mortise-tenon connections were also added between the parts with a place for welding, so that everything could be assembled like Lego, and in general maintain a specific style, because adult toys should also be beautiful. All this is quite important for a welding shop where it is rarely clean. Of course, at the concept stage, a better design in this regard was thought out, where the cable chain and the motor are located inside a channel closed at the top and sides in order to have complete protection from external contamination, but this option is quite difficult to implement. In the future, it is also possible to add a radial cable channel around the base for the welding cables to finally protect the cables from friction and contamination. 1. Number Of Unique Components: 168 2. Total Number Of Component Occurrence: 436 3. Number of features: 1480