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
• 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
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
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
Flexible Material Handling - Fabric
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
Flexible Material Handling - Fabric
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
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
Flexible Material Handling - Membranes
RPI team developed robotic end effector to handle fuel cell membrane
Flexible Material Handling - Membranes
Vacuum alone not sufficientSpatula used to break surface tension
Flexible Material Handling - Membranes
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
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
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
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 !!