Tennis Ball Assembly Line Robots have become an important part to the manufacturing industry. The ability of these machines to act human-like makes it easy to do jobs that may be hazardous to humans or complete the tedious, repetitive jobs that humans complain about with virtually no down time. The Tennis Ball Assembly Line utilizes the Stäubli and Scara robots to create a production line that packages three tennis balls in a tube and puts a lid on the tube. The program that was created to control the operation of both robots was adapted to fit the new process. A java program was created that controlled commands that were sent to the Adept controller, which controlled the commands for both robots. The controller uses V+ language commands to actuate the movements of not only the robots, but also the conveyor. Robot Control The gripper was designed to grip a tennis ball and a tube, and be mounted on the six axis Staubli robot as shown. The actuator used in the gripper is a pneumatic cylinder with a 12mm bore and a 15mm stroke. The gripper converts the cylinders vertical linear motion to an angular motion, and then back to a horizontal linear movement that is mirrored to create a gripping motion. The jaws of the gripper have a cylindrical and spherical cutout that match the radius of a tennis ball, and tennis tube. The parts for the gripper were made in a rapid prototyping machine, and the gripper has been built and tested at 60 psi. It successfully grips a tennis ball and a tennis tube without deforming the tube. An indexing rotary table will be used as the pick position for the tennis balls and tennis tubes. The rotary table uses a stepper motor that receives commands through a micro-bot that will be controlled by the same host PC as the other robots. An attachment was designed and built to nest nine tennis balls and three tubes and fit on the existing rotary. Design Specifications Prototype tooling designed to place and seal a lid on the tube has been built and tested using the SCARA robot. The tooling consists of a spring loaded suction cup that is connected to an SMC vacuum ejector, and two rollers. The tooling will bring a lid from a nest to a point above the tube using the vacuum, descend when the lid is above the tube, and then rotate 180 degrees. The rollers are positioned at a height that will seal the lid while the spring loaded suction cup collapses to a height above the rim of the tube. Assembly Line Implementation With Multi-Robot Control By: Kyle Fecteau, Peter McHugh, and Thomas Zack Engineering Senior Design Project - Advisor: Dr. Carlos Luck The USM Robotics Lab has two robots with two separate workspaces. The Stäubli is a 6 degree of freedom robotic arm, and the scara is a four degree of freedom arm. The two robots are combined to create a bigger working envelope, which is created by the use of a conveyor that penetrates both robots work spaces. In previous years work has been done to create a program that operates both robots in parallel. About the Robots Thinking Matters Conference, Spring 2010 Stäubli Scara