Fully Automated Pick and Place Machine with a Scanner

Lim, Eng Hock (2020) Fully Automated Pick and Place Machine with a Scanner. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Pick and place machines are commonly used in the manufacturing industry. Those machines are used to pick up a product and send it to another station. The pick and place machines which can be seen in the manufacturing industry commonly could not differentiate the products. To improve the pick and place machine which able the machine to recognize different products, a scanner will be added to enable the machine to have this feature of product recognition. Besides that, pick and place machines without a scanner would not know whether the product is a fault or in good quality. Those manufacturing industries which are using the pick and plane machines without a scanner, the employers have to hire workers to quality control department for product's quality checking. With a scanner, the machine will scan whether the products are defected or in good quality. Electronic devices have low chances of mistakes or errors compare with humans in checking the quality of the products. There are types of human errors such as skill-based errors and mistakes. Skill-based errors contain slips of action and lapses of memory while rule-based mistakes and knowledge-based mistakes are in the category of mistakes. Those errors and mistakes seldom happen in an electronic device, except there are some errors in the software or hardware of the device. Apart from that, pick and place machines are able to move in three-axis, X-axis, Y-axis, and Z-axis. Y-axis and Z-axis are used to move the robot's arm while the robot's arm will move in Z-direction to pick up a product or place a product. In this project, RFID scanner was used because a pick and place machine with a RFID scanner will be able to differentiate the products by scanning the RFID card attached to the products. With a scanner, it will save the cost of the industry, which can cut the cost of the employees where the salary of the employee is increasing every year. On top of that, the conveyor will be driven by a servo motor in X-axis, where Y-axis and Z-axis are driven by belt. The pick and place robot with RFID reader was designed and built, the RFID reader is able to differentiate various product and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) for the pick and place robot mechanism was done. The prototype was tested for many times to ensure the robot is working perfectly. The robot has a maximum of plus and minus 0.1mm tolerance after the accuracy test was done. Besides that, the maximum deflection of this prototype is too small, which is 0.0001935mm (actual dimension of the structure), 0.0003843mm (half of the actual dimension of the structure), and 0.000774mm (quarter of the actual dimension of the structure) due to the force applied in this application is small. Besides that, the factor of safety is huge due to the limitation of size can be chosen while purchasing the materials. On top of these, the robot can complete 2 processes in 1 minutes and 11 processes in 5 minutes for station A and complete 3 processes in 1 minutes and 14 processes in 5 minutes for station B. The speed of the robot can be increased if the robot is driven by other components such as ball screw, or linear motor.