For my senior design project, my team created an automated syringe capping system. This project was done for a dental chemical company that was looking to improve their manufacturing processes. The primary objective was to reduce human operator fatigue and improving overall efficiency.
The capping system was designed to take a dental syringe as an input, and then a threaded cap would be automatically released from a vibrating bowl. Optical sensors were used to assure a cap was released, and the syringe would be constrained and aligned with the cap. The cap was fed into a component that would constrain it, and this component was moved by a lead screw to the bottom of the syringe so it could be capped. A current sensor was used to assure the cap was tightened consistently. A DC motor was used for capping, stepper motors for moving and constraining the syringe and moving the lead screw, and a servo motor for ejecting the capped syringe from the system. The automation aspect of the system was managed by a Raspberry Pi running a Python script, which facilitated control of the various motors and sensors.
