Facilities

The Centre is equipped with a variety of equipment to carry out various research activities.

There are two industrial robots used for projects in force and position control, visual servoing and collision avoidance:

·         AdeptOne manipulator system with fifth axis and variable compliance wrist, workcell equipped with static camera and eye-on-hand camera.

·         PUMA 560 manipulator with indigenous controller and six axis force/torque sensor.

·         CRX A255 Robot from Canada.

The Centre is also equipped with a wide range of computers, of different capabilities, capacities and purposes.

·         An industrial computer consisting of a VME bus and Sparc 2 CPU with data acquisition cards.

·         PowerXplorer parallel processing system (with 8 Power PC modules with 32 Mb local memory each,).

·         Intel 80196, A&T DSP32C, and various in-circuit emulator and micro-controller development systems.

·         Silicon Graphics, SUN, HP and Intergraph workstations, IBM PC compatible computers and Machintoshes.

·         Echelon Lonworks Distributed Control System

There is also a flexible manufacturing system consisting of a closed-loop conveyor system serving a CNC milling machine, a CNC turning machine, and an ASRS with a robot at each machine to perform loading and unloading operations. This system allows the study and development of work relating to FMS, such as communication and networking of manufacturing environment.

Machine vision is also introduced in many projects to enhance the intelligence of automated systems. The centre is equipped with vision systems of different capabilities, and one transputer-based parallel vision system.

The Centre also possesses two three-axis Makino CNC milling machines and a three-axis Makino machining centre, two Okuma CNC turning machines, a five-axis Maho CNC machining centre, two CNC EDM machines, a computer-controlled CMM and several conventional workshop machines and equipment for the fabrication of special instruments, devices, and mechatronic systems employed in the R&D activities of CIPMAS.