Mechatronic design for repeatability of a single-camera alignment system in pick-and-place machines

The demand for electronic devices like telephones, tablets and computers is still growing and will grow further in the future. All these devices contain electronic components, which are placed on printed circuit boards (PCBs). The assembly of a PCB is performed by several machines in an assembly line. As the accurate placement of several hundreds of these components on a PCB is a complex task, specialised Pick and Place (P&P) machines are used in an assembly line to perform this task. The production time required to assemble a PCB is determined by the a number of components a P&P machine can place per hour. The ”extremely high-volume production machine” AX-5 P&P machine (Assembl´eon B.V.) has a maximum of 20 P&P robots in parallel and is selected as the benchmark machine. Each robot is capable of placing 8,000 components per hour. To double the throughput from 8,000 to 16,000 components per hour per P&P robot a shuttle is added while maintaining the accuracy.