E-Quality Design Of Experiments For Structural Electronics

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a technology utilized for creating complex parts by adding layers of material in order to create a three dimensional functional part. This technology has been pushed to a new level of functionality where mechanical parts are combined with electronic components to create Three-Dimensional Structural Electronics (3DSE) systems. This new technology has been used to replace Printed Circuit Boards (PCB), for 3D SE are light weight and can be created in any desired shape. Computer Aided Design (CAD) software is used to design the part and a Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) machine is used to 3D print the part with slots for the electronic components to be embedded. Researchers have been working on embedding electronic components for several years, but so far all the embedding of components is done manually. The research presented in this paper provides a new approach for embedding electronics by utilizing a Yamaha SCARA robot in order to automate the pick and place process. Automated placement of electronic components is an ongoing research area, and in this paper a design of experiment (DOE) is conducted to measure accuracy on the Yamaha SCARA robot in order to facilitate accurate placement of electronic components