Continuous Floor Assembly

What we built

SolVIS built the floor line as one coordinated machine rather than a set of independent stations. Thirty-one axes of servo motion work together to convey the lumber, square the frame, and drive the gantries and actuators that position and process each board, so the line keeps moving instead of stopping and starting between steps.

Two Keyence inkjet printers mark the boards inline, and encoders track position along the line so the controller always knows where the material is and fires each operation at the right place. Cognex machine vision at the marking station reads and checks the boards as they pass. Frame-squaring, conveyance pull-down, and Z-axis gantry actuators do the physical work of getting each board square and in position.

The controls are a Mitsubishi platform end to end: MELSERVO servo drives on the coordinated axes, a GX Works3 PLC running the sequence, micro VFDs on the conveyance motors, and a GT2512 touchscreen HMI for the operator, all running from a UL508A control panel SolVIS designed and built in-house.

System at a glance

• Coordinated motion31 servo axes
• Plant integrationSCADA and MES
• Control panelUL508A, designed and built in-house

Run from the plant's systems

The line does not run as a standalone island. It is integrated up to the plant's SCADA and MES, so it takes its build information from the production system and reports back what it has done. The floor being built matches the order in the system, and the line's status is visible to the plant through the systems it already runs on. Operators work from the HMI at the line.

Capabilities used

Coordinated multi-axis motion control, servo and VFD integration, PLC and HMI programming, mechanical design of gantries and actuators, inline inkjet marking, machine vision, custom UL508A panel fabrication, and integration into plant SCADA and MES systems.

On the line