Design, procure, and install a work cell that will polish both rectangular and aluminum fuel tanks in various lengths and cross sizes and diameters.

Polish these tanks so that human contact during the polishing is absolutely minimized to prevent any health hazard.  While doing this meanwhile a reasonable cycle time to further reduce he manufacturing cost.

History:

Currently, all customers requested polished, round aluminum fuel tanks are sent outside for polishing.  The request is handle by each truck plant per truck build schedule.  These tanks are built at fuel tank assembly area ahead of times and in order to give sufficient amount of lead times for the outside polishing process. Thus, requiring additional handling and building ahead of schedule build at the cell area.

Characteristics of the robot:

One person operates this robot.  He just opens the program and enters data required then run the program.  The program will control the operations of the robot.  This robot is able to polish any length and 23, 24, 25, and 27 diameter-fuel tanks and is able to polish any length and cross section sizes fuel tanks. It is able to polish completely each end sections and polish around all fittings and filler neck with minimum wear and tear on the polishing disk or floppy wheel. It polishes entire length of the varying tanks and 120 degree of the entire tank with no scratches allowed and keeps all dust particles away the operator.  Solid polishing material is used with this robot.

Progress:

Because the time of one term is too short to complete the entire project, our group just worked on the rotation of, moving up/down, and moving to left and to right the tank.  We will discuss more information of mechanics and how processing robot.