In lean manufacturing, any activity that does not add value to an assembly is waste. Taken to an extreme, the time a pick-and-place mechanism spends moving a part could be considered waste. In that light, it's not surprising that electronics assemblers are equipping their lines with pick-and-place machines that can put down more than 30,000 cph.
To get such high rates, the placement head must get from the pick positions to the board very quickly. And, thanks to improvements in microprocessors, motors, bearings and feedback technology, it can. Today's linear motion systems can achieve speeds exceeding 2 meters per second. "We've done some applications that can go 4.5 meters per second, and we had one that had to go 9 meters per second," says Lee Stephens, an applications engineer with Danaher Motion (Radford, VA).