International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)

ISSN (Online): 2319-7064

Impact Factor (2012): 3.358

Automated material handling system based on the

PLC
Fares Mohmmed Mehdi Hassan1, Asaad Musaab Ali Yousif2

1 Tianjin University of Technology and Education, Auto Maintenance Engineering Education,

Dagu South Road,Hexi District,Tianjin,PRC. 300222, China
[email protected]
2 Tianjin University of Technology and Education, Electronics Engineering Department,
Dagu South Road,Hexi District,Tianjin,PRC. 300222, China
[email protected]

Abstract: This paper is based upon use of PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) for the purpose of automated material handling to pick
metallic parts and place it in the box. Currently many researches works have been done on the subject of material handling. However their
approaches seems to be more complex and cost higher. This because they always employ complex logic components which are expensive. In
this research we proposed an automated material handling which is easy to implement and cost effective.

Keywords: PLC, metallic parts, Automation, sensors.

1. Introduction 2. Case study

Automation has brought several drastic changes in Here we take up the case of automated material system
manufacturing over the past century. These changes include where the objective is to place parts inside boxes
increase in overall productivity and profitability of a through a three axes arm robots.
manufacturing system. Development of electronics
(transistors and microchips) led to a jump in control 2.1 Existing system:
technology and precision of various instruments. This laid a
path for efficient and cost effective manufacturing processes. When a material handling system is to be made autonomous
Automation of manufacturing systems requires integration there is a need for additional sensors and appropriate control
of various fields such as mechanical, control and electronic logic to manage the discrete events. It should be also noted
systems, and computers .Automation in various forms that an autonomous system does not differ much structurally
constitutes the backbone of most major industries. It has from the existing system. This reduces the overall cost for
become a significant part of defense, medical, aerospace and the automation. Even before the system is built, modeling
automotive industries, materials processing and handling, and simulation of the system gives not only a good
manufacturing, and consumer products to meet the perception of the dynamic operations, but also a method to
increasing demand for the production volume and product verify the design. An autonomous material handling system
variety. can be modeled as discrete event system at a certain level of
In the manufacturing industry, automation in material abstraction. For high speed automation, both gantry and
handling has increased the overall profitability of the articulated arm robots are widely used throughout industry.
product with an improvement in the quality and productivity Because of the many inherent advantages of the gantry robot,
of the system. This is primarily due to two reasons. First, it is rapidly becoming the preferred choice for: [2]
automation reduces the total production cycle time, and  palletizing storage and retrieval
second, it helps smooth flow of raw materials and finished  machine loading parts transfer
products to their desired location with little or no human
 material handling automated assembly
interference. [1]

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 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Impact Factor (2012): 3.358

2.2 Proposed system: a computer network that plugs into the PLC. The
communications interface is used to receive and transmit
The system is used stepper motor, 3ph-motor sensors and data on communication networks from or to other remote
PLC to pick the metallic parts and place it inside box. All the PLCs. It is concerned with such actions as device
manual operations are replaced by sending signals from the verification, data acquisition, synchronization between user
PLC to the respective devices. The work of pick & place applications and connection management.
metallic parts from various places is automatically done by a Some of the advantages of using PLC include:
three axis arm robots setup that is controlled by the PLC.  Programming the PLC is easier than wiring the
The EM 253 Position Module is an S7-200 special function relay control panel.
module that generates the pulse trains used for open-loop  The PLC can be reprogrammed. Conventional
control of the speed and position for either stepper motors or Controls must be rewired and are often scrapped
servo motors. It communicates with the S7-200 over the instead.
expansion I/O bus and appears in the I/O configuration as an  PLC takes less floor space then relay control panels.
intelligent module with eight digital outputs.  Maintenance of the PLC is easier, and reliability is
Based upon configuration information that is stored in the V greater.
memory of the S7-200, the Position module generates the  PLC can be connected to the plant computer
pulse trains required to control movement. systems more easily than relays.
The Position module provides the functionality and
performance that you need for single axis, open-loop We have chosen PLC_200 Series Programmable Logic Controllers
position control: with the following features.
 High speed control with a range from 12 pulses per
second up to 200,000 pulses per second.
Table 1: S7-200 CPU Model features [3].
 Absolute position control.
Feature CPU 226
 Relative position control. Physical size (mm) 190 x 80 x 62
 Manual position control.
 Continuous operation. Program memory:

with run mode edit 16384 bytes

without run mode edit 24576 bytes

Data memory 10240 bytes

Memory backup 100 hours

typical
Local on-board I/O
Digital 24 In/16 Out
Analog --
Expansion modules 7 modules1

High-speed counters
Figure 1: the EM 253 Position Module connected to PLC
over the expansion I/O bus. Single phase 6 at 30 kHz

Two phase 4 at 20 kHz

3. PLC Hardware specifications: Pulse outputs (DC) 2 at 20 kHz

A programmable logic controller is a digital computer used Analog adjustments 2

for automation of electromechanical processes. Industrial Real-time clock Built-in
PLC describes the computing unit of any industrial Communications ports 2 RS--485
Floating-point math Yes
automation system and therefore need to meet several
Digital I/O image size 256 (128 in, 128 out)
challenging requirements such as high reliability,
environmental noise and influence immunity and also Boolean execution 0.22
enhanced protection classes (e.g. water-resistant and dust
sealed). speed microseconds/instruction
PLCs also satisfy the needs of continuous 24 hours/7 days Picture
operation and availability over a wide environmental
temperature range as well as real-time operation capability
and security and safety enhancements.
The input/output arrangements may be built into a simple
PLC, or the PLC may have external I/O modules attached to
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 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Impact Factor (2012): 3.358

4. PLC-Software specifications: Table 3: actuators and functions

No. type function
PLC programs are typically written in a special application 1 3ph-motor Parts conveyor table
on a personal computer, and then downloaded by a direct-
connection cable or over a network to the PLC. The program 2 “ Boxes conveyor table
is stored in the PLC either in battery-backed-up RAM or
some other non-volatile flash memory. Often, a single PLC 3 Stepper motor Longitudinal axis movement
can be programmed to replace thousands of relays. of the arm robots
The STEP 7--Micro/WIN programming package provides a 4 “ Transversal axis movement of
user-friendly environment to develop, edit, and monitor the the arm robots
logic needed to control your application [4]. STEP 7-- 5 “ Vertical axis descending
Micro/WIN provides three program editors for convenience movement of the arm robots
and efficiency in developing the control program for your 6 “ Magnetic gripper
application. To help you find the information you need,
STEP 7--Micro/WIN provides an extensive online help
system and a documentation CD that contains an electronic
version of this manual, application tips, and other useful
information [5].

5. Basic design of the system:

Major applications of mechatronics include automation,

robotics, sensing and control system, microcontrollers/PLCs,
computer-machine controls and others. Mechatronics is a
design process that includes a combination of mechanical
engineering, control engineering and computer engineering.
Basically a mechatronic system comprises of a basic
mechanical structure (to generate a certain carrying behavior
or movement), sensors (to collect information on the system
or the environment), processors (to evaluate the information
and to generate correcting variables according to certain
Figure 2: the sensors position into the system
rules), and actuators (to convert correcting variables into
forces, movements, electrical voltages or other quantities
which act on the basic system or its environment).
This Automated material handling system is composed of an
entry/exit bay of metallic parts, a three axis arm robots,
actuators, sensors, drivers and an entry/exit bay of boxes.

Table 2: sensors and the functions.

No. type function
1 Limit switches Arm robots detector at zero
position (picking area)

2 “ Top limit switch of the arm

robots vertical axis

3 “ Bottom limit switch of the arm

robots vertical axis

4 Photo electronic Part detector at the picking area

Figure 4: the actuators and there position in the
5 “ Box detector at the placing area System

6 Proximity Arm robots movement detector

sensor
7 “ Magnetic gripper detector
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 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Impact Factor (2012): 3.358

Figure 5: sample for the box

6. Working

When a PLC executes a program, it must know in real-time

when external devices controlling a process are changing. Figure 6: the box cells x1, x2 and x3 are the distance from
During each operating cycle, the processor reads all the the part conveyor belt, y1 and y2 the distance from the first
inputs, takes these values, and energizes or de-energizes the Colum to second Colum and third Colum
outputs according to the user program. This process is
known as a program scan cycle. 6.3 Ladder flowchart
6.1 Generally This ladder flowchart shows how the control program look like

Boxes are transported by a conveyor belt from the entry

bay to the conveyor belt that positions the boxes in the
placing area. The parts conveyor belt transports metallic
supplied parts. The three axis arm robots picks the parts
using a magnetic gripper and places them in the previously
positioned box. The loaded boxes are then transported to the
automatic exit conveyor belt for the boxes.

6.2 The boxes

The box is subdivided into 9 cells (part/cell) after the three

axis arm robots picks the part then the PLC sends pluses out
to control the stepper motor move FW/BW for specific
distance according to cells position in the box. The required
pluses for stepper motor for this distance it should be
calculated and stored into the PLC memory the program it
can call it from the memory directly figure (6) shows the
box cells and there distances.
The PLC will send pluses for stepper to move 1 st time X1
distance, 2nd X2 distance, 3rd X3 distance, 4th X1&Y1
distance, 5th X2&Y1 distance, 6th X3&Y1 distance, 7th
Figure 7: shows the ladder flowchart.
X1&Y2, 8th X2&Y2 and the last X3&Y2.
In this ladder flowchart there are 7th states S0.0, S0.1, S0.2,
S0.3, S0.4, S0.5 and S0.7 .the S0.0 it will be active when the
program start running and then the system will read the Part
detector , Box detector , Arm robots movement detector and
Magnetic gripper detector to active S0.1 which guide the
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 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Impact Factor (2012): 3.358

robots move to zero position (picking area) after pick a part

then the program will active S0.2 which allow the robots
move to placing area and place the first part into first cell of
the box again the program will active S0.1 to pick the 2nd
part and then the S0.3 will be active to allow the robots
place the 2nd part into 2nd cell The program will repeat same
sequence for other parts .

7. Result

After we download the program into the PLC-200 and finish

Figure 10: connection of actuator and drivers of the system.
the connection of the sensors, actuator, drivers, inverters,
power supply converter, encoders, the EM 253 Position
References
Module and then test the system we did some modification [1] Dasari, Siva Kali Prasad, "Sensor Based PLC
for the ladder after that the system was working stably Programming for a Discrete Event Control System.”
figure (8), (9) and (10) show some connection of the final Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2003 [1].
model of the system. [2] Parker Hannifin Corporation Electromechanical
Automation Division Irwin, Pennsylvania [2].
8. Conclusions [3] S7-200 Programmable Controller System Manual
Edition 09/2007 A5E00307987—03 [3], [4].
[4] PLC-SCADA Based Automated Logistics
The whole system has good compatibility and compact
Warehouse Management System V. Ramanan & Sachin.
structure. It is easy to install, and the line running is stable in R [5].
the actual production. The labor intensity is greatly reduced
for workers, so it has a high degree of automation. On the
basis of ensuring the quality, it improves product efficiency,
and brings great economic benefits to the production side. Author Profile

Fares Mohmmed Mehdi Hassan he is

bachelor student (last year) in Tianjin
University of Technology and Education, Auto
Maintenance Engineering Education .his area of
interest Microcontroller, PLC and Control
system designing.

Figure 8: some connection of the final model of the system. Asaad Musaab Ali Yousif he is M.S. student
(last year) in Electronics Engineering Tianjin
University of Technology and Education,
during 2012-2014, he stayed in
Communications signal processing, his area of
interest PLC, Microcontroller, programming
and Automation.

Figure 9: some connection of the final model of the system.

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