Students: Erik Endlich, Salvatore Cahyo Muliajati, Anton Vonk, Quinten Oudijn (2024)
WERKSE ANNOUNCES AUTOMATED TECHNOLOGY TO REDUCE WORKLOAD ON PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES
Client: Werkse!
Den Hoorn, The Netherlands – November 5th, 2024
Summary
Werkse introduces a new robotic arm to help workers with disabilities improve their productivity. This innovative solution enhances productivity through collaboration between humans and robots. Using this technology, Werkse seeks to create a more inclusive work environment that empowers people with disabilities to work effectively.
Problems
Soldering small components is challenging for someone with tremors, as precision and stability are required. Also, for someone with disabilities, working with components that have a high heat is dangerous. The quality of the solder results will vary per batch, and most of them failed the quality assessment.
Solutions
- Auto Height Calibration
We use a detachable holder design, allowing the worker to manually clean and/or replace the solder whenever necessary. This design changes the offset between the robot’s end-to-arm centre and the solder tip. We create functions for the robots to calibrate each time before approaching the mold.
- Auto Leveling
As we use the custom-designed mold, we encounter an issue with the height difference between the middle and each side of the mold. We instruct the robot to level the height on each mold side and average the height difference to use it as an offset.
- Dynamic Mold Placing
Following the company’s aim for workers with disabilities to improve their productivity, we made the mold can be dynamically put inside the detectable box. This approach enables us to make the project friendly for new workers and workers with disabilities.
- End of Effector
We designed our own end-of-arm tool for attaching the solder and the motor to extrude the tin. We use this approach because we found that the solder end-of-arm tool is very expensive, and it differs from our soldering job, where we need to deal with a tiny component.
- Point Calibration
We use a bounding square as a reference for the world coordinate systems. Because the camera mounting is moveable and the mold can be placed anywhere inside the box, we used four points from the bounding box to measure the coordinates from the world and convert them to the robot’s coordinates. We use this because we need the millimeters precision to solder the component.
Customer Quote:
“I am absolutely satisfied with this project.
Very surprised at the speed of development of molds and attachments.
The molds for cables and sensors are close to perfect and usable without the robot arm.
Perhaps with more time and better soldering equipment, the results would be better.
In short, I am very satisfied with the results of this project and the team members.
Thanks….– Ernst Jan Bonnet, Werkse”