Bekum America Corporation is a industry machine development and assembly firm focused on developing technologies for plastics and container manufacturing. One of their recent machine developments which allows for ordering and transferring a variety of container types between conveyors using a camera and robot arm, called the Bottle Orientation System (BOS). The operation procedure of this machine, however, requires several complicated and redundant steps by the operator to achieve the goal. The operators of this machine are not expected to have extensive training and technical experience with these operating procedures thus the complexity must be reduced and the interface streamlined.
Design and develop an external touchscreen device to be used as an external interface for robot functions. The goal for the touchscreen device will be to replace most manual interactions with proprietary robot controller components, and reduce the total number of steps required for operating the system. The touchscreen should host a fully functional PC housing a web browser to display our web app client. This web app will be powered by a local server that will communicate necessary commands and information to the FANUC robot controller. The user-interface will be designed with accessibility and ease-of-use in mind.
Meet our team! They won't bite:
Sam is a senior Electrical Engineer at MSU. He is our Team Manager, and is responsible for making sure the team cooperates with efficiency. And he's doing a great job!
Sam's technical efforts toward the project include hardware selection, designing the system, and designing the screens.
Emily, our Document Lead, is a senior Electrical Engineer at MSU. She prepares and formats all official documents released by our team regarding the project, and ensures they meet guidelines and encourage effective communication. She has a huge vocabulary and is astute at utilizing it.
Emily's technical efforts toward the project include software solution selection, designing the system, and designing the automated procedures.
Gurwinder, a senior Computer Engineer here at MSU, serves as our Presentation Lead. He makes sure all our official project presentations are effective and designed to capture the attention of our audience, while emphasizing the significant points of our project.
Gurwinder's technical efforts toward the project include software solution selection, and led the internationalization effort for the client software.
Alec Joiner, our Lab Coordinator, is a senior Computer Engineer at MSU. As our Lab Coordinator, he is responsible for coordinating aquisition of project equipment, as well as establishing guidelines for our lab environment.
Alec's technical efforts toward the project include software solution selection, hardware selection, as well as investigating and designing robot communications.
Zain Syed, a senior Computer Engineer at MSU, is our Webmaster. He was responsible for creating and maintaining this website. Lookin' good!
Zain's technical efforts toward the project include software solution selection, robot communication investigation, communication implementation, and front-end implementation.
Our final report is available here in Microsoft Word (.docx) format: Final Report
Application Notes by Samuel Saia
Application Notes by Gurwinder Singh
Application Notes by Emily Skipton