1 / 16

Flexible Material Handling Past, Present, and Future

Flexible Material Handling Past, Present, and Future. Professor Steve Derby MANE Department October 18, 2006. Professor Steve Derby. Designed automation work cells and conducted related research for over 35 companies 8 US patents in automation and mechanisms

alder
Download Presentation

Flexible Material Handling Past, Present, and Future

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Flexible Material Handling Past, Present, and Future Professor Steve Derby MANE Department October 18, 2006

  2. Professor Steve Derby • Designed automation work cells and conducted related research for over 35 companies • 8 US patents in automation and mechanisms • Authored “Design of Automatic Machinery” • 6 years work in Fuel Cell MEA process design • 4 years work B&L soft contact lens inspection • Started 2 robotic automation companies

  3. Flexible Material Handling • RPI team has had many projects in past 25 years with material handling of flexible objects • Fabrics • Hydrated contact lenses • Springs • Surgical robotics • Fuel Cell Electrodes & Membranes

  4. Flexible Material Handling - Fabric • RPI team developed a machine to make custom shaped swimming pool covers consisting of many panels • CAD/CAM process • PC based controls • Large (9 ft x 75 ft) gantry robot • Unrolled fabric (woven polypropylene) • Sensed and compensated for fabric defects • Marked with 2 colored inks (cut lines, sew lines, alignment fiducials) • Rolled up for cutting process

  5. Flexible Material Handling - Fabric

  6. Flexible Material Handling - Fabric • RPI team created a robotic workcell to press men’s dress trousers (during manufacture) for Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) • First tried to duplicate humans • Sense wrinkles then smooth out • Finally gripped with 4 grippers - easier

  7. Flexible Material Handling - Fabric

  8. Flexible Material Handling - Fabric • RPI team developed system for digital printing of textiles for sampling and small lots of custom designed fabric • Developed unique CMYK color set jetable textile fiber reactive dyes • Material handling (zero tension) of fabric • Designed and built our own custom ink jet print heads with active redundancy, including sensing of condition of each individual orifice (thousands), and automated error recovery • Created custom raster image processing (RPI) • Built working Proof of Principle Model

  9. Flexible Material Handling - Springs • RPI team created automation to handle springs for • Kodak one time use camera assembly • Texas Instruments sensor assembly • Standard Gage (Brown & Sharpe) dial indicator assembly

  10. Flexible Material Handling - Membranes RPI team developed robotic end effector to handle fuel cell membrane

  11. Flexible Material Handling - Membranes Vacuum alone not sufficient Spatula used to break surface tension

  12. Flexible Material Handling - Membranes

  13. Stack Assembly Material Handling • Automation is needed to handle (load/unload, transport, manipulate, align, assemble) stack components • Bipolar plates, end plates • Cell seals • Electrodes • MEA’s • Electrodes and MEA’s are not rigid

  14. Stack Assembly Research Challenges • Validation of incoming components and materials • Robust and efficient handling of fragile flexible materials • Custom fixturing and end-of-arm tooling • Vision guided precision placement • Vision/sensing/tension control to avoid wrinkles • Assembly with tight geometric and force tolerance (Incremental stack performance / leak test?) • Design for manufacture & assembly

  15. Stack Assembly Material Handling • Automation cannot simply duplicate present day human assembly techniques and rely on post assembly testing • Research needs to be conducted to develop better methods with integrated modeling, design, sensing, & control • Research will likely produce suggested stack component design rules

  16. Stack Assembly Material Handling • Lab demo shows early work to date • Consortium needed to increase dialog & exchange with fuel cell component suppliers, fuel cell manufacturers, fuel cell users, & fuel cell researchers to accelerate progress • No commercially viable product without automated assembly !!

More Related