The Engineering Faculty Internship provides the Principal Investigator an opportunity to study a high-volume robotic automation system and interact with the designers and users of such a system. This system is the printer assembly system designed to assemble on the order of 100,000 printers per month. One of the key problems in high volume (hundreds of thousands of units per month) mechanical assembly is the lead time required to design and implement automation systems and the additional time required to ramp automated production to full volume for a new or redesigned product. The research is concerned with understanding the factors contributing to these long lead times and lack of flexibility for automated assembly systems. On the basis of the collaboration of the university and industrial in conjunction with study of the system at hand, the major factors contributing to long lead times and lack of flexibility will be determined, alternative designs proposed, and proof-of-concept experiments conducted.
