• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
• /
• v.30 no.7 s.250
• /
• pp.741-749
• /
• 2006

For last couple of decades, uses of TFI-LCDs have been expanded to many FPD(Flat Panel Display) applications including mobile displays, desktop monitors and TVs. Furthermore, there has been growing demand for increasingly larger LCD TVs. In order to meet this demand as well as to improve productivity, LCD manufactures have continued to install larger-generation display fabrication facilities which are capable of producing more panels and larger displays per mother glass(substrate). As the size of mother glass becomes larger, a robot required to handle the glass becomes bigger accordingly, and its end effectors(arms) are extended to match the glass size. With this configuration, a considerable static deflection occurs at the end of the robot arms. In order to stack maximum number of mother glasses on a given footprint, the static deflection should be compensated. This paper presents a novel static deflection compensation algorithm. This algorithm requires neither measurement instrument nor additional vertical axis on the robot. It is realized by robot controller software. The forward and inverse kinematics considering compensation always guarantees a unique solution, so the proposed algorithm can be applied to an arbitrary robot position. The algorithm reduced static deflection by 40% in stationary robot state experiment. It also improved vertical path accuracy up to 60% when the arm was running at its maximum speed. This algorithm has been commercialized and successfully applied to a seventh-generation LCD glass-handling robot.