Automated Testing System Design

The Project

This four-person project involves the conceptual design of an automated testing system, for a large electronics factory in Cheshire. The factory produces over a thousand industrial motor drives a day, all of which are tested above and beyond governmental standards to ensure consistently high quality. Currently, each drive must be manually loaded into a pre-tester, then a few minutes later, disconnected and transferred to a main-tester. The factory commissioned this early-stage project to explore the feasibility and potential cost-benefits of automating the testing process.

As process flexibility was a key requirement, all system concepts involved the use of robots to plug/unplug electrical connections. This spawned a sub-project investigating the specific challenge of robotic cable insertion.

The Benefit of Automation

As well as labour savings/reallocation, an automated system solves time loss problems associated with human-induced line imbalances, thus increasing throughput. As the main-tester equipment is very expensive, its utility is critical; as is line balancing in accordance with the company's Lean Manufacturing principles.

There are, of course, serious human implications to increasing automation, something we were keen to impress upon the company's management. While I firmly believe that automation is necessary progress towards a fairer, upskilled society, human concerns should not be dismissed, and must be addressed from the outset.