Automated Transformer Lamination Stacking

Off-the-shelf grippers do not handle thin steel laminations well. They warp the sheet on pickup, let it shift mid-transport, and slip on drop. Worse, the sheets are ferromagnetic and want to stick to each other in the source stack, so a naive magnetic pickup grabs three or four at once.

The team designed a custom magnetic end-effector with two ideas baked in. Cushioning, so each sheet seated cleanly against the tool without bouncing on pickup or placement. Spreader components, so adjacent sheets in the source stack released cleanly and only one came up with the gripper. The result was a tool the robot could trust to pick a single sheet every cycle.

The workflow followed the shape of Rex's existing process. Each lamination started in a vertical feed station, which matched how the sheets came off the punch line. The robot picked one off the stack, rotated it ninety degrees into the horizontal, and placed it onto a conveyor that carried it to the next operation.

The rotation was the part that needed the most tuning. The arm had to commit to the move without the sheet slipping, the cushioned magnetic hold had to stay engaged through the swing, and the placement had to land flat enough that the next sheet stacked on top of it cleanly. Once a batch was loaded, the cell ran end to end with no operator intervention.