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Our objective was to create a pick and place mechanism for a non-planar 3-stage manufacturing process. In our case we considered the manufacturing process of a dice.
The first stage of dice manufacturing involves plastic injection molding, followed by stamping, to imprint numbers on each face of the dice. Both the molding and stamping processes are carried out on the same plane. The third and final stage involves packaging the dice, which typically occurs out-of-plane.
Challenge
The main challenge was to create a non-planar, 3D pick and place mechanism operated using just one motor. We also had to find an appropriate way to transmit motion intermittently to the pick and place mechanism arm, as there were only some specific regions in space where the arm had to move to pick up/drop the object.