Development of robotic technology to trim custom molded polyurethanes parts

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Our industry partner, Talmolder, was established in 1980 as a supplier of molded foams for the office furniture industry. Through the years, many innovative ideas were developed that allowed Talmolder to manufacture custom molded polyurethanes parts for the industries, such as, health care, store fixtures, seating, juvenile, transit, advertising, construction, sports and recreation, etc. The products are delivered on time with environmentally friendly, competitive pricing and quality. One of the steps of the manufacturing process is to trim the parts. In polyurethanes industry, not only at Talmolder, this trimming step has been conducted manually: skilled works are required to carefully cut the edge of the parts to maintain quality of the products. Compared with the robotic process, the problems associated with the manual process are: i) the process is slow, even with skilled workers; ii) the cost of labors is high; iii) the cutting quality of the parts is hard to be controlled for high precision. In this proposed research we aim to develop robotic technology to trim the polyurethanes parts. A body hold arm will be developed to hold firmly the part under trimming; an edge hold arm will be developed to move together with a laser arm with laser beam to trim the edge; the laser arm is guided by a camera with advanced image processing capabilities to cut the edge properly. This initial research and development work will establish a significantly improved production process. This will be a significant step towards process automation in the polyurethanes industry, reducing human errors and effectively boosting product quality.