Linear Guides (3)

As companies strive to move goods rapidly, accurately and efficiently, they’re breaking with conventional distribution methods and investing in automated storage and retrieval systems for their operations. These new, automated systems include shuttles that pick and place products, stacker cranes...

Deciding the ideal linear guide for your application involves carefully assessing the application from every angle. Parameters such as load, dynamics, precision and environment are important in determining the choice of technological equipment.

When you want a linear guide to move a heavy load in a demanding application, you usually have one choice: a heavy-duty profiled guide and its associated misalignment issues.

Higher load requirements often mean the more compliant guides that find good use in medium-precision applications are...

When it comes time to choose a linear rail for medium-precision applications, many designers automatically opt for a profiled rail. In doing this, however, they automatically preclude certain types of linear rails which can prove to be much better suited - not to mention less expensive - than the...

How much precision do I really need? Here's an interesting question for an industrial designer of linear motion systems. Why? Because greater precision doesn't always result in better performance.In fact precision requires a surplus of complexity that affects the total cost of the application.

Even if you start with a basic setup, gantry systems often require more than 100 hours of engineering activity, including specifying dozens of parts across many vendors. With countless failure points and a multitude of suppliers, it’s hard to know who to call when something goes wrong. Generally,...

Since actuators serve as the workhorse of so many applications, they must be reliable. When specifying a Cartesian robot system, the overall quality of your actuator is essential. And picking an actuator with rigid linear guides and heavy-duty ball screws can make all the difference.

Since...

Many automated tasks across the automotive, electronics and consumer goods industries are accomplished by sophisticated, six-axis articulated arm robots designed to perform highly precise operations. But if you need to move these robots into position, it makes sense to add a seventh axis––a linear...

How much should the ability to manage the misalignment of a linear guide impact when designers and planners are faced with a new application project? The answer is a lot, particularly when the application to be realized does not require such rigorous precision as to impose the choice on a specific...