ENGS 89/90 Reports

Degree Program

B.E.

Year of Graduation

2022

Project Advisor

Laura Ray

Instructor

Solomon Diamond

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

2022

Abstract

IDEX Health & Science (IH&S) needs a system to autonomously reorient ball seats and place them into carriers for a step in the manufacturing process. A ball seat is a small cylindrical object with a continuous hole through its central axis. Due to the large scope of the project, we parallelized the development of five subsystems among our teammates. The subsystems include a rolling system to put the ball seats in a rolling orientation, a vision system to identify the location of the chamfer, an orientation system to rotate the ball seats chamfer-up or chamfer-down, a pick-and-place system to load the parts into the loading tray, and a human-machine interface to report machine status to the user. In summary, our solution integrates machine vision with various actuation techniques to properly stage the ball seats throughout the reorientation process. This automation will increase employee engagement and intellectual stimulation as it allows them to be trained in the higher skilled work of operating an automated machine rather than the low skill work of pick- ing and placing ball seats. In fact, over 1000 labor hours are spent using tweezers to pick up the ball seats and using the naked eye to identify chamfer location, which is time that can be allocated to other areas in the manufacturing plant.

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Restricted: Campus/Dartmouth Community Only Access

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