Undergraduate Student Projects

POSITION CONTROL PROJECT

Summary

Position control is a group project for 3rd year engineering students enrolled an automation & IoT course of Monozukuri Engineer Program in academic year 2016. The program is supported by AMEICC and cooperated with JTECS. The aim of this group project is to give students learning and practicing in process design to meet a required specification. After designing the process, building a prototype, coding the program, and testing for results, Students have realized that their designed mechanisms have a great impact on the desired accuracy of positioning control.


Design

This group selected rack and pinion mechanism to convert a rotational motion from motor to a linear motion. They used a linear potentiometer as a displacement sensor.

Build

They sketched the CAD files and used 3D printing to make the pinion gear and rack. They used Arduino board (an open sourced controller) to control a DC motor which drives the gear box then the pinion gear. They used a PI technique of feedback control to move the platform to a desired position. They also added the 7-segment module to display the moving position.

Test

A digital dial indicator was used to evaluate the performance of position control. Although students used PI control in their systems, they still could not meet their designed precision. The reasons were backlash and loose fit in the gear box. And in this case, the backlash in the rack and pinion system. However, students have learnt that the selection of mechanism effects the process quality.