1-D simulation and control of servo slide based pneumatic pick and place device

Pick and place devices are the main material handling systems in many of the manufacturing industries. An ideal pick and place device should handle a specimen with minimum time for a given operation with the least human intervention. The main objective of the study is to optimize the operating times of a servo slide based pick and place device. The work presented in this paper focuses on modeling the system using 1-D simulation method and implementation of two optimization methodologies to improve the handling times of the pick and place device. The system is modeled using Multi-physics simulation software AMESim and co-simulated using MATLAB.Simulink. A genetic algorithm implementation is presented which is used to arrive at an optimized PID controller and system parameters. An additional method by means of Simulink is used to tune the controller manually and is compared with the former method.