A board tester using four arm robot

A board tester using four arm robot

Keywords Printed circuit boards, Robots, Tescon, Yamanashi University

Tescon, a Japanese maker of electronic printed circuit board manufacturing machines, has introduced a four arm robot in the PCB testing machine. This system, called Twintes, offers a solution on testing printed circuit boards in small lot size.

In the past, final tests of printed circuit boards were conducted by special machines with fixtures having hundreds of testing probes specially manufactured to specific PCB models. This may have been good for mass produced PCBs, but not economical for PCBs with smaller lot size. There is a testing machine that uses a gantry robot approach to flexibly adjust to PCB model changes, but its processing speed is not satisfactory.

Tescon and Professor Makino of Yamanashi University (inventor of the SCARA robot) have developed Twintes in collaboration. In principle it is built on twin two arm SCARA robots with four testing probes which are moved by a special acceleration/deceleration control scheme to establish a testing speed as fast as 0.04 sec/point and a newly developed "occupied quadrant control algorithm" to make collision avoidance of four testing arms possible.

 Four arm PCB testing robot (Tescon)