Design for Automation and Automated Manufacturing of Drug Testing Kits

This paper describes the design for automation and development of manufacturing automation for a law enforcement product, the Narcotics Identification Kit, a high volume product widely used in the field of law enforcement. Modifications to the previous design, emphasizing design for assembly and automation are first described. With the new product design, an automated assembly process is developed and described in this paper. The automation system to produce the high volume product is next described. The entire project is an industry-academic collaboration in experiential manufacturing engineering education. In the project-centered approach, the students gain real-world experience while creating innovative solutions satisfying the needs of industry