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 sufficient
Spatula 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
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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 !!