Automatic Pick and Place Machine
Supervisor: Dr Khairul Hamimah Binti Abas
This project mainly focuses on designing Automatic Pick and Place machine which function to pick soft contact lenses from the tray and place it to a specified cassette automatically. This project is related to industry and proposed by ALCON Malaysia. ALCON Malaysia also join forces with Ciba Vision to offer the most comprehensive eye health and vision care. The purpose of this project is to solve the problem that occur in production process of contact lenses in ALCON Malaysia. Currently in the Cast Molding process in ALCON, after extraction process, contact lenses are picked manually using a suction picker from the tray and place it in a cassette for another process of vacuum drying and plasma coating, thus this process consumes a lot of time to finish a single cassette. As this machine is automated, Arduino Mega 2560 controller has been used to control input and output of transducers. Besides that, for mechanism structure, this machine used linear track from aluminium profile v-slot and stepper motors in order to move in three axis which is x, y and z direction precisely. This machine provides multiple pickers at the end effector of machine to pick multiple number of contact lenses in one time. For the result, this machine is much better compare to humans because it improving process time of pick and place of contact lenses with multiple pickers which is reduce more than 50 per cent. Furthermore, this Pick and Place machine work automatically, thus will reduce a lot of energy as required to pick and place a lots of contact lenses by a single person as before. This project achieved the goal which is to provide the best technic that can handle a lot of soft contact lenses while it operating automatically, smoothly and provided flexible design.
Result:
1. Machine operate automatically
2. Reduce manpower
3. Reduce Processing time
4. Small design and reduce space consumption
5. Provide flexibility for custom or modified
Prototype (product finishing):
a) Automatic Pick and Place Machine
b) Circuit
c) Multiple picker vacuum