A Novel Quadruple Dispensing Heads Sticking Adhesive Tape Robot System and Its Applications

Industrial robots are increasingly being used to assist and replace workers in factories to address the global labor shortage in various applications. The use of robots can provide many benefits to the effective production and manufacturing. Taping is one of the robots' applications. However, current tape robots can only tape one strip at a time, which can be time-consuming in practice if multiple strips of tape are required at the same time for special workpieces. This paper presents a novel sticking adhesive tape robot system. As the object to be taped are four-line hot pipes to be attached on the outer shell of refrigerator, thus four strips of tape are required at the same time before assembly process. The proposed robot system contains the novel tooling called “Quadruple Dispensing Heads”. This tooling was developed to tape four strips of tape to be applied simultaneously. This tooling can adjust the gap of tape strips from 80mm to 110mm. Moreover, the research objective is to produce a robot system that can apply tape with higher quality and faster than human workers, so that human workers can move on to more complicated tasks instead of performing repetitive, routine tasks that do not require such special skills and knowledge. As the result, our proposed system can achieve the four lines of I.Sm length, through IS7N pushing force (when operate the air working pressure at O.SMPa) sticking taping task perfectly with 100% success rate of experiments in just 3 seconds and faster than human worker significantly. Since, human worker needs about 3 seconds per each I.5m taping line. Therefore, human needs approximately 12 seconds in total for four lines. Accordingly, our proposed robot system is faster than human worker in four times.