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CNC Automatic Door System

The objective of this project is to develop an automatic door system for CNC manufacturing machines that includes increased efficiency, safety, affordability, ease of installation, and ease of operation when compared to current industry solutions. This project is sponsored by The Robert E Morris Company, a company that specializes in manufacturing machine and tool distribution based in Dover, NH. This automatic door device enables a robot to open and close the operator door of a CNC machine automatically in order to access the workspace and relieve the need for human interaction during manufacturing processes. For this project, we chose the most common CNC machine sold by The Robert E Morris Company as our baseline machine to design our device around, the Okuma M560-V. The operator door on this machine is a single direction, two section, telescoping door. For our design we employed a high-torque Teknic ClearPath servo motor to drive two pulleys of different diameters in order to control the necessary differing travel distances of the two door sections. The pulleys, mounted with timing belts, are rotated both directions between two defined points, being the open and closed door positions. These belts are mounted to two linear slides along a linear rail to enable consistent, smooth motion, resulting in a robust, long lasting design. Each linear slide is mounted to the respective door sections for the opening and closing of the machine door. There are inductive proximity sensors at the two positions to indicate the status of the door to the robot. All of these aspects are mounted to a central extrusion beam for ease of modification. The design consists of 15 custom 3D-printed parts designed and fabricated by the team. All controls are conducted by a Universal Robots UR10e collaborative robot which is also a common item sold by The Robert E Morris Company. Overall, this is packaged into a modular extrusion base table, retrofitted with replica Okuma doors to demonstrate the application on a CNC machine by loading and unloading a part to a workholding vise. Moving forward, we will work closely with a team made up of members from The Robert E. Morris Company, Okuma, and Velocity Products to transfer the “prototype” design into an actual product. This will involve modifying certain aspects to work with the machine and determining the infrastructure required to produce the device. This product will aid machine shop owners and manufacturers in incorporating automation and exponentially increase production using a reliable, efficient, and affordable solution.

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