The equipment is a robotized workstation and is used to for automated drilling of miniature orifices in stents. Stents are thin shaped tubes for use in surgery. An operator will place a pallet with stents into the machine and will turn on an automatic drilling process. An RFID reader will read up the code of the pallet in order to select the defined layout for drilling.
The drilling as such is carried out in the required distribution by a four-axis robot whose relevant drilling head is clamped in the end effector. Having the orifices on one side of stents been drilled through, the pallet in the holder will be turned over by 180° and drilling will automatically be carried out from the other side as well.
(the machine is used in Czech Republic by a German customer)