A novel continuous single-spindle doffing robot with a spatial cam and multiple grippers

Abstract

Doffing machines for ring spinning machines include single-spindle doffers and group doffers. Group doffers are efficient but complex and expensive to build. Present single-spindle doffers are easy to build and low in cost, but it contacts and hurts yarns in cops and even damages spindles after a long ride. This paper developed a novel continuous single-spindle doffing robot with a spatial cam and multiple grippers for ring spinning machines, called the SCMG robot. The SCMG robot mainly consists of a doffing device, a moving and locating device. The doffing device is composed of 14 grippers moving along a fixed 3D trajectory of a spatial cam. The moving and locating device adopts a positioning wheel meshing with the bottom of spindles. The mechanism principle, structure and force analysis of the SCMG robot are introduced in detail. Experimental results show that the SCMG robot can pull the cops out of the spindle vertically one by one. The grippers grasp the top of the cops without contacting the yarn. The SCMG robot is highly efficient and reliable.