Assembly task such as inserting a peg into a hole causes many problems i.e. jamming or wedging in the assembly process. To overcome such difficulties, various assembly methods have been developed. However, the suggested active or passive assembly method has limitations in such tasks as multiple hole insertion, assembling nonstandard parts. slender peg insertion and assembling parts which have large friction coefficient. Therefore, assembling method utilizing vibration is proposed in this thesis as one of the possible alternative for these tasks.
In this thesis, a pneumatic vibratory assembly device was developed which has the capability of vibrating a gripped part and servoing the gripper in the horizontal plane. The Pulse Width Modulator and the PI controller is used to take the full advantages of the pneumatics for the position control of the device and a gap sensor was used as the position feedback sensor. The characteristics of this device was investigated for various parameters through a series of experiments. Although the PWM controller is used, position error can be elliminated using an integrator. However, because a large reference input can cause the device to be unstable as a typical characteristics of a nonlinear system, we found the optimal range for the parameters where this device can be used for the positioner with vibratory motion through the above experimental procedures.
However, in this thesis an assembly algorithm utilizing this vibratory insertion device is not developed. Further research is necessary for this task.
