Furniture at prices low enough to fit everyone's pocketbook - that's the Ikea success formula. This does not mean that the furniture has to come from low-wage countries. The foldaway mechanism on Ikea's Ektorp Pixbo convertible couch is manufactured by Sedac-Mecobel in Wevelgem, Belgium - a country with some of the highest wage levels in Europe. Stefaan Gantois, Director of Sedac-Mecobel: "Consistent automation keeps our manufacturing costs so low that they even fit into Ikea's pricing structure."

Ikea joined forces with the Belgian sofa specialists to develop the Pixbo. Stefaan Gantois: "Right from the outset we realized that laser technology was going to be essential to getting the required ‘look' for this couch." For instance, it would have been impossible to stamp out the keyhole-shaped apertures needed to fasten the support straps. The frame's square tube would have been deformed and it would have been impossible to hook the fabric in place.

Using a laser cutting unit represented the starting point for planning a production line suitable for the Pixbo frame. But, there were conflicts with the high automation level they strived for. Prior to that there had been no such thing as a link between a TruLaser Tube and a robot cell.

The real challenge to Sedac's planning experts was how to remove the cut tubes from the laser unit. Automatic removal is normally restricted to stacking parts on a pallet. Great precision is not a top priority during that process. Yet Sedac wanted their automation to be effective end-to-end, which meant that the robot had to pick up the cut tubes and feed them directly to the bending and welding station. The TruLaser Tube thus had to place the cut tubes in a precisely defined position, since all the subsequent operations were dependent on this. To find a solution to this problem, Gantois consulted with V.A.C. Machines in Bruges, TRUMPF's exclusive agents in Belgium. V.A.C. took up the challenge and developed for Sedac the world's first part removal robot for a laser cutting device.

The laser machine is the unit that dictates the speeds for all the other equipment, as Pedro Vanrijckeghem, product manager for TRUMPF laser units at V.A.C, explains. "The configurable digital interface fitted to all of TRUMPF's laser units informs the other controls in the production cell when a part is finished and exactly what part that is." Right now cycle length is two minutes and thirteen seconds. But they have every intention of speeding this up even further. Gantois: "The TruLaser Tube 5000 is the fastest machine we could get and by optimizing the processing strategy we can accelerate laser cutting even further. Our target is a two minute cycle."

Telling the robot that a component had exited the laser unit was one of the tasks. The other one was to "offer" the component to the robotic gripper in a certain position. To further complicate matters, no fewer than seven separate components for the assembly have to be produced on the TruLaser Tube. "During the night shift and on the weekend the machines run completely on their own, with no human input required," emphasizes Stefaan Gantois.