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

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

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 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 !!