Automatic Handling for Valves Trimming System

Abstract

Shortage of workers in manufacturing industry has become one of the critical issues in every industry nowadays. Valves manufacturing process is involved forging and trimming process of brass workpieces which are hazardous and able to harm the workers. The aim of this project is to develop an automatic handling of valves in trimming system for replacing human workers. A 6-DOF articulated robotic arm is integrated with vision system for effectively picking the workpieces from the feeder and placing them to the rotating die for being trimmed. One of the challenging problems is the uncertainties of the shape of the forged workpieces related to flash. The specially designed impactive gripper and machine vision are developed to resolve those uncertainties. The gripper is a parallel jaws gripper designed to grip and hold an object with irregular geometries. For the selected model of valve, the system is able to work at 1,033 pieces hour at 96.67% success rate which is comparable to the capacity of the current human workers.