Cooperative robotic soldering of flexible PCBs

The expanding 3C (Computer, Communication, and Consumer electronics) manufacturing industry leads to a high demand on the soldering of flexible PCBs. Current manual soldering has the disadvantages of low output, low speed, and low efficiency, and upgrading soldering operations with robotic technologies is mainly limited by the property of deformation of flexible PCBs. In this paper, a novel robotic manipulation system is developed for automatic soldering of flexible PCBs, consisting of the hardware of a dual-arm configuration and the software of a cooperative control scheme. The proposed system works in a sequential manner, in the sense that a Cartesian-space region reaching controller drives an assistive arm to actively contact the PCB first, and a vision-based tracking controller activates a soldering arm after the deformation is stabilized. The proposed formulation eliminates uncertain deformation of flexible PCBs and thus guarantees the feasibility of robotic soldering.