This project was an ANR project to develop an aerodynamic conveyor system to move photovoltaic cells during the various stages of their manufacture. The movement is done through modular blocks which form an air cushion underneath the cells (Fig. 1). Being flexible, the conveyor allows to trace a path which can change its shape according to the organisation of the modular blocks between the different manufacturing machines.
The main contributions of this work are :
- improvement in the design of a modular block whose surface contains millimetre-sized orifices allowing the passage of air (Fig. 3);
- modeling of the air jets below an object,
- definition of control laws to control the opening of the ports of each block independently so that the object can maintain a fixed position or follow a desired trajectory [1],
- validation of the proposed controller on a simulator and an experimental platform (Fig. 3).
My collaboration enabled the laboratory to win the "Best paper in automation" award for the first time during the ICRA 2015 conference. I also participated in the writing of another article [2] which was published in the newspaper T-RO in 2017.
References
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[1]B. Dahroug, G. J. Laurent, V. Guelpa, and N. Le Fort-Piat, “Design, modeling and control of a modular contactless wafer handling system,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Seattle, WA, USA, 2015, pp. 976–981.
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[2]V. Guelpa, G. J. Laurent, B. Dahroug, and N. Le Fort-Piat, “Modular contact-free conveyors for handling planar fragile objects,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 92–101, 2016.
Associates
- Nadine Le-Fort Piat (University Professor, ENSMM, Institut FEMTO-ST, Besançon, France)
- Guillaume Laurent (Associate Professor, ENSMM, Institut FEMTO-ST, Besançon, France)
