Consideration on the handling of flexible, brittle and continuous member in fusion splicing robot for optical fiber ribbons

This paper presents the configuration and performance of the fusion splicing robot which splices optical fiber ribbons (flexible, brittle and continuous member) automatically. The handling strategy and structure for the optical fiber ribbons were proposed. It provided significant improvement of productivity and splicing quality. Splicing time was 3 minutes which was one third of the conventional way. The failure strength of the spliced points was 30% stronger than that of the conventional way