• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.277-283
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• 2014

This paper presents the design, optimization and fabrication of a piezo driven micro-positioning stage constructed using a 3D-printer. 3D printing technology provides many advantageous aspects in comparison to traditional manufacturing techniques allowing more rapid prototyping freedom in design, etc. Micro-positioning stages have traditionally been made using metal materials namely aluminum. This paper investigates the possibility of fabricating stages using ABS material with a 3D printer. CAE simulations show that equivalent motion amplification can be achieved compared to a traditional aluminum fabricated stage while the maximum stress is 30 times less. This leads to the possibility of stages with higher magnification factors and less load on the driving piezo element. Experiment results agree with the simulation results. A micro-position stage was fabricated using a 3D printer with ABS material. The motion amplification is very linear and 50 nm stepping was demonstrated.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.1950-1956
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• 2017

In food-printing field, precise positioning technique for a printing object is very important. In this paper, we propose cup positioning method for a latte-art printer through image processing. A camera sensor is installed on the upper side of the printer, and the image obtained from this is projected and converted into a top-view image. Then, the edge lines of the image is detected first, and then the coordinate of the center and the radius of the cup are detected through a Circular Hough transformation. The performance evaluation results show that the image processing time is 0.1 ~ 0.125 sec and the cup detection rate is 92.26%. This means that a cup is detected almost perfectly without affecting the whole latte-art printing time. The center point coordinates and radius values of cups detected by the proposed method show very small errors less than an average of 1.5 mm. Therefore, it seems that the problem of the printing position error is solved.