Automated quality control for printed circuit boards

Interview on the application with Bernhard Driller

Bernhard Driller is CEO of Four Stars Engineering Systems GmbH, which specialises in developing solutions for producing printed circuit boards. With RoboStar, his company offers a low cost robotics solution, which enables a cost-effective and fully automatic quality control of printed circuit boards. In the interview, he talks about his reasons for using low cost robotics and the advantages of automation.

Did you encounter any difficulties during the implementation with the help of robolink? If yes, please let us know! We are a company primarily involved in the electrical testing of printed circuit boards. Robotics were new to us and therefore the project contained many new tasks with a number of problems that had to be solved. The robolink components basically caused the fewest problems.

What did you particularly like about the implementation with robolink? Due to our own competence we are able to provide the complete motion control of a multi-axis system and to extend it in this application to a robot application. Together with our drives, the mechanical interfaces of the robolink joints enabled a simple and fast integration.

Have you combined the robot arm with your own components? If yes, why? It was important to us that our automation could handle printed circuit boards with very different formats without an operator having to make any mechanical adjustments during the format change. That led to the general decision that only one robot solution came into question. Furthermore, a universal format-independent suction gripper was developed that is produced via 3D laser sintering and can simply be connected to the robot.

In what ways do you benefit from automation today? With automation we have an innovative product that will allow our company to grow in a new area in the coming years. By using automation in the electric printed circuit board test, our customers benefit from higher efficiency and from higher security as errors caused by people are eliminated.