Whether you’re looking for the flexibility in movement offered by a conveyor topper on your AMR, efficiency by combining tasks performed by the AMR, or a lighter-weight replacement for your client’s current AMR-mounted conveyor, a lightweight conveyor topper from Glide-Line may be the exact solution you’ve been looking for.
Integrators recognize Glide-Line as a provider of completely configurable conveyor designs. That same configurability allows us to offer conveyor toppers that are perfectly fit for your clients’ AMRs, from length and width to height and weight. Four conveyor topper design features can affect the efficiency performance of your AMR, and all can be solved with a lightweight, yet powerful, conveyor from Glide-Line:
Construction materials
Motor Selection
Weight to Power Characteristics
Complexity of the conveyor itself
Construction Materials
This one seems obvious, but isn’t all that easy in application. AMR conveyors’ construction materials can often be heavy in an attempt to improve strength and weight capacity on the AMR – especially for large, heavy-duty conveyor toppers. However, strong but lighter materials, from which Glide-Line’s AMR conveyor toppers are constructed, achieve the goal of lightening the load on the AMR while also handling small-to-medium payloads up to 200 pounds. Lightweight shouldn’t mean weaker when it comes to your client’s product transferring using an AMR conveyor topper.
Motor Selection
Autonomous motorized robots use DC power to run conveyor toppers. However, other companies have switched from the clunky and inflexible heavy steel roller conveyor, designed to run on large frame gearboxes and motors and are retrofitting their system to work with a DC motor.
Glide-Line already uses a DC motor as a standard; it’s light, compact, and already built into the design we apply to the conveyor application on your client’s AMR. Keeping the entire conveyor, including the DC motor, as light and compact as possible also increases efficiency for the AMR – a win-win for everyone.
Weight to Power Characteristics
The materials used to create the conveyor topper can either add to the weight on your AMR or significantly reduce it. Large AMR conveyor toppers will often use steel roller or full width belts to convey heavy-duty products and pallets. If a manufacturer simply shrinks the size of their normal, heavy-duty conveyor to accommodate a smaller AMR, the weight can bog down the robot and reduce efficiency.
Compare that scenario to an AMR conveyor topper built to be lightweight and powerful; it can actually improve your clients’ robots’ efficiency. One of the more prominent differences between those shrunken heavy-duty conveyors and a lightweight AMR conveyor from Glide-Line is the conveying medium. We build using a high tensile strength timing belt, resulting in a strong conveyor belt that is lightweight but also provides a smooth motion for products as they are transferred. Glide-Line also has a 192 degree wrap around the geared timing pulley, thus creating a powerful conveyor with exceptional drive characteristics.
Conveyor Complexity
Solving your customers’ unique needs can result in some of your best ideas and designs for integrating AMRs into their processes. But when you’re incorporating a traditional conveyor, the design could get complicated quickly when combining more than one conveyor motion on a singular AMR, or within a small space. You may even be forced to compromise your design to accommodate the limitations of traditional conveyor concepts.
When it comes to unique conveyor designs optimized to achieve maximum transferring power with as few movements and as little complexity as possible, Glide-Line is the expert. We have a number of different creative solutions for unique AMR application needs. Read about just a few of them in this post about unique conveyor toppers for autonomous mobile robot (AMR) vehicles.
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Simply put, we build elegant, creative AMR conveyor topper solutions – and we encourage you to add your own creativity to the mix when it comes to solving unique challenges your client may face in their processes. This helps reduce the complexity of the AMR conveyors because they’re built to suit the needs of your clients – and you can eliminate unnecessary bulk to achieve a lightweight, powerful conveyor for your client’s robots.
Glide-Line Offers Lightweight Conveyor Toppers and Framework Built to Solve Challenges
For products and pallets under 200 pounds, Glide-Line’s conveyors are perfect. And the best part is, they’re already built for AMRs. They’re completely configurable to any size robot, down to the millimeter—and we can even provide a customizable platform for the AMR to easily reach the height needed to transfer products smoothly.
For more details, read our latest ebook, How Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) Integrators Incorporate A Lightweight, Customizable Conveyor To Adapt To Their Application and Product.
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