PACE Zenith Awards 2014: Young Achiever Award sponsored by SICK
WINNER: Daniel Egan-Wyer
from Machinery Automation & Robotics (MAR)
The primary automation project that Daniel has worked on during his 18 months at MAR involves designing, manufacturing, testing, supply, installation and commissioning of a multi-million dollar, mobile robotic, idler change out system for underground and above ground whilst the conveyor is still running under load.
Key technologies utilised are 3D vision, PC control, and 6-axis robot control. Daniel worked on this project as one of three key MAR automation engineers.
His primary responsibility, under the mentorship of the other two senior automation engineers, was the development and integration of complex Visual Basic code.
This inputs from real time 3D scanning and outputs to coordinate robot for multiple automatic robot tooling changes and robot paths.
This project has a high level of innovation and essentially R&D embedded in it with the commercial pressures of a normal project.
Achieving Site Acceptance has been a long and challenging road and Daniel has handled himself with composure in achieving these challenges, displaying initiative, and innovation, and highly structured technical problem solving capability well beyond his years.
Furthermore, he has handled well the pressures of short timeframes, extended time on-site and a challenging site environment. His motivation and attitude throughout the project despite his inexperience is exceptionally noteworthy.
This has been shown through his ability to operate well within, and become a key contributing member to the team. Without this, the project could never have achieved success.
Achieving Site Acceptance has been a long and challenging road and Daniel has handled himself with composure.
Besides the significant added value to MAR that this project brings, there is a very solid prospect of repeat system orders both within Australia and internationally.
Daniel has shown great innovation, initiative and technical skill in cutting edge automation technologies of 3D vision and complex robot control.
He has developed structured Visual Basic code to coordinate the actions of the robot and implement the sensing algorithms to automatically execute multiple robot tool changes.
Actions include raising the conveyor belt whilst still running and complete replacement of worn idlers with new idlers before lowering the conveyor belt down on the new idler set.
Daniel has developed structured Visual Basic code to coordinate the actions of the robot.
The code written by Daniel controls the steps of this process, during normal operation as well as under fault conditions or when the cycle needs to end prematurely.
His program also provides a Graphical User Interface for the operator to provide feedback on what the system is currently doing, and implement user interaction appropriately.
This project has provided significant uptime savings to the client by being able to change out worn idlers without stopping the conveyor belt as well as totally eliminating the risk of injury to operators which is prevalent in the traditional manual idler change out process.
Through this project Daniel has developed into one of MAR's most capable automation engineers.