The demand for automation of production processes has an increasing trend. This trend is fundamentally fueled by a lack of skilled labor, demand for accelerated production or elimination of human error. For the needs of partial automation of the production line, a robotic manipulator for automatic testing of air conditioning units was developed. The manipulator consists of four axes for positioning of the measuring connector. An electric drive in the Y axis was used to position the grounding axis supplemented by a pneumatic drive for positioning in the X axis. The entire control of the robotic manipulator is realized by an industrial PC with the REXYGEN control system using advanced function blocks.

The position of the connector is not known in advance and is recognized by a camera. Connector position recognition is based on the template matching method where the current image from the camera is compared with expected patterns and the position of the connector is determined. Furthermore, the QR code is recognized to determine the unit type. Two cameras have been used to increase the reliability of the whole system.

The system communicates with a number of other systems, the communication scheme is shown, see the diagram below.