Flexible Material Handling

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Flexible Material Handling Past, Present, and
Future
Professor Steve Derby MANE Department October 18,
2006
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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 BL soft contact lens inspection
• Started 2 robotic automation companies

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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

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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

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Flexible Material Handling - Fabric
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Flexible Material Handling - Fabric

• RPI team created a robotic workcell to press
  mens 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

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Flexible Material Handling - Fabric

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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

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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

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Flexible Material Handling - Membranes
RPI team developed robotic end effector to handle
fuel cell membrane
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Flexible Material Handling - Membranes
Vacuum alone not sufficient Spatula used to break
surface tension
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Flexible Material Handling - Membranes
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Stack Assembly Material Handling

• Automation is needed to handle (load/unload,
  transport, manipulate, align, assemble) stack
  components
• Bipolar plates, end plates
• Cell seals
• Electrodes
• MEAs
• Electrodes and MEAs are not rigid

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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

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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

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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 !!