Soft product assembly and manipulation

With soft products, especially those with loose filing, the package dynamics are continually changing and the and thus cannot be successfully modelled. The conformance of such products when mechanically handled also results in a high probability of packet rupture. A collaborative project, funded by EPSRC and DTI under the LINK initiative, is investigating the problems of handling soft products in the form of bagged loose materials. The partners De Montfort University, Birmingham University and Robotec Ltd., have designed a prototype system utilising air handling to cushion fragile products and a vision system to determine package orientation. The vision system is utilised as a sensor to provide nonconformance input to a novel control and actuator system. The actuators utilise piezo-mechanically operated air microjets to steer the packages into the correct orientation and propel them along a pneumatic support “cushion”. Actuator systems are also being designed utilising magnetostrictive materials and/or moire mesh techniques. The control system is reactive and adaptive and makes use of distributed parallel microcontrollers. The controllers are based on fuzzy rules and have elements of intelligent learning activity to modify the rules