The industrial & manufacturing engineering (IME) department within the College of Engineering has received a free Kawasaki robotic arm worth $40,000, according to manufacturing engineering lecturer Trian Georgeou.
“It was a huge surprise,” Georgeou said.
A robotic arm has a multitude of articulating joints that can be programmed through computer software programs to perform tasks. It is usually used to maneuver, move or manipulate pieces.
Kawasaki Robotics Regional Sales Manager Russell Morrow contacted the manufacturing engineering department chair, Daniel Waldorf, about getting the robot arm for free as long as the department paid the $6,000 shipping fee. The Gene Haas fund paid half of the shipping, and the department paid the other half.
The robot was then delivered in October 2022, and a senior manufacturing engineering project team got to work fixing it to the ground.
This year’s team, comprised of manufacturing engineering seniors William Haslett, William Preston, Matthew Garrido and Joshua Zabaneh, is undertaking programing the arm with safety features.
There are two safety systems that the team is going to incorporate: Cubic-S and a Keyence SZ-V laser scanning machine. The Cubic-S is a hardware and software solution that allows the team to physically set up parameters, which creates a human and robot safe zone. The laser scanning machine will have a boundary that if an object or a human crosses, it will shut off the arm.
The team is also working on getting the arm pickup four by eight sheets of metal. They hope to use the robotic arm to take the metal sheets and cut them into smaller pieces for welding, Preston said.
The team uses a Di-Acro Power Shear that can cut up to 48-inch long pieces to cut the sheet metal into easier-to-handle pieces. This requires a small number of people and is dangerous, Preston said.
The sheet metal itself is expensive, and half of the costs are currently going into cutting the metal, according to Georgeou, which the department covers. The department is one of the top in the country in IME, so they receive funding from outside companies. The U.S. News & World Report ranked the industrial and manufacturing engineering program number one in the nation among all non-PhD granting universities in 2020.
The sheet metal is large and sharp, so there is the potential for injury when handling and cutting it, Georgeou said.
“Last quarter, we paid $700 to shear sheet metal,” Georgeou said. “And the sheet metal alone was right around $750.”
The team cannot just work with the robot on day 1; they require background information and to study it.
The first step of the project is research so the senior project team knows how the systems work and the best way to implement them. It will also expose the team to how the industry actually cuts sheet metal.
“And then once we do that, it’ll be a decent workload to actually make sure that everything is working together perfectly well,” Preston said.
The team also has to tackle documentation, Garrido said, so future senior project teams know how to use the arm and can follow their work.
“The importance of documentation not only for the current team to know to repeat tasks that we’ve learned, but also for future teams to say oh hey…we can repeat that,” Garrido said. “And maybe only one of us knows how to do it and then say that person leaves or something else happens, and then how do we have that sort of continuation of knowledge through our team?”
The goal for future teams is to build upon the automation of the arm the team is working on this year. The robotic arm will be automated to complete other tasks besides cutting the sheet metal.
Eventually, they will make a new catch tray for the smaller metal pieces so the robot can pick them up to be able to cut them into even smaller pieces.
With technology only taking over more and more, manufacturing engineers must know about industrial automation, Zabaneh said. He said Robotic arms are used a lot in the industry with building cars, computers, etc., especially in manufacturing.
According to Zabaneh, this project will help the team learn more and help them cover every aspect of their portfolio so they can get good jobs in the field.
“We’re excited to get through this thing and tackle it. And we’re the robotic arm wrestlers, and we’re ready to wrestle this problem,” Zabaneh said.