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Efika 5200B Project

Semiconductor Wafer Carrier Robot

in category Robotics
proposed by charlestonchoo on 27th October 2007 (accepted on 27th October 2007)

Project Summary

The aim of this project is to create a robot that will transport a single 9 lb cassette of semiconductor wafers around a fabrication plant. The robots purpose will be to transport the cassettes to and from process tools and storage shelves, thus reducing the amount of manual labor performed as well as lowering the risk of injury to the operator�s backs. The current testing area for the robot is the Electronics Lab on the 3rd floor of the Moody Engineering Building at Trinity University.

We decided that the easiest thing to do (given experience and skill sets) would be to make it a line following robot that follows a track that has been set up on the floor. The robot will be �told� where to go by either a keypad input on the robot itself or through a wireless interface connected to the internet and reachable through a redirecting service such as no-ip.org.

We�ll be using the following hardware:

EFIKA (of course)

U2C-12 (USB/I2C/SPI/GPIO) interface board

4 HVW HB-25 high current motor drivers

4 Banebots RS-385 Planetary Gearmotors

4 Kornylak Transwheels

Wheels that can be driven or translated

12-16 Fairchild QRB1134 IR

Phototransistors

4 Devantech SRF02 sonar rangefinders

6V, ~150Ah Deep Cycle Battery

Smaller 12V Li-Ion or Ni-MH battery to power the EFIKA (hasn�t been decided yet)

RFID reader/tags

It appears to be a daunting, heavy, and powerful robot, but this is because one of the design criteria for this robot is that it has to be able to survive a collision without damaging its payload (if such an unfortunate thing were to happen). Such a thing should however be prevented by using the sonar sensors to detect any obstacles in front of or to the side of the robot.

Proposals:

Get Debian running on the EFIKA and set up a VNC server to access the EFIKA without a video card

Program the robot to follow lines, deal with forks and T-intersections in the track

Make the robot able to decipher a map stored in memory, and then have it compute the most efficient route to take to its next destination

Use RFID tags to let the robot know its current location so it can find its next stop

Create a lift of some kind to lower and raise the cassette so that operators on the floor do not have to bend to access it

Project Blog Entries

Up and running...

posted by charlestonchoo on 18th December 2007

After a fit with getting the EFIKA to read a USB drive, I finally got everything up and running in the middle of November. The end of the semester was particularly tough so updating the blog ran by the wayside of course.

Currently, I'm trying to learn the protocol to interface with the U2C-12 so I can interface with the SRF-02 sonar sensors. I found a pretty good resource to help understand robot control and I2C interface.

The hard drives that we were supplied with are supposedly somewhat finnicky but I've had no problems with mine yet (*knock on wood*).

The project is on track for the moment. The biggest hurdle will be interfacing with I2C. Once that's done, the rest of the project will come together relatively quickly.

Hope to report major advancements in the next two weeks!

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