Armstrong Dematic Work Experience



Robotics New Product Development Manager

Armstrong Machine Builders Pvt. Ltd.
Pune, India(July 2021 - May 2023)

AMR Development

As part of this project, I was responsible for developing an in-house AMR solution for the internal material handling process in the industry, with a payload capacity of 1 ton.
Actions: I formed a team with other stakeholders, including electrical, mechanical, software, and automation teams. I defined the scope for each team member and created a project timeline the ADER framework. My responsibilities included, but were not limited to:

  1. Benchmarking competitor AMRs and their specifications.
  2. Validating mechanical design calculations for the drive system, wheel size, battery size, weight distribution, center of gravity, etc.
  3. Validating electrical design calculations for the battery, motor, sensors, etc.
  4. Creating RFQs for vendors of motors, batteries, wheels, sensors, etc.
  5. Updating the design document regularly and creating the BOM (Bill of Materials) for the AMR.
  6. Developing the test plan for the AMR and creating test cases.
  7. Integrating operational and safety functionalities into the AMR.

Vision Based Depalletizer Development

As part of this project, I was responsible for developing a vision-based depalletizer for the internal material handling process in the industry.

Situation: Currently, large warehouses are transitioning from manual depalletizing to automated depalletizing using robots. However, there are still recurring costs to the company when it comes to changing or modifying the SKUs or the palletizing pattern. A robotics integrator is required to modify the taught/hardcoded program based on the SKU size and pallet pattern. This is a time-consuming process and requires significant engineering resources.

Task: I was tasked with developing a vision-based depalletizer that can be used for any SKU and any pallet pattern. Moreover, it needed to be a robust system that could be deployed to any size of industrial robot and remain immune to environmental changes.

Actions: I quickly learned the basics of programming industrial robots using a teach pendant and understood how numerous interlocks are set to make the system fail-safe. I also learned the basics of vision systems and benchmarked existing vision-based depalletizer systems. I designed the architectural logic and programmed the system using Python. For the vision system, I used YOLOv4 and OpenCV for carton detection and cropped the background based on distance to avoid false positives. I created a custom dataset with different SKUs, pallet patterns, and lighting conditions.

Result: The system was able to detect cartons with 98% accuracy achieving the required throughput. Additionally, the system successfully detected cartons under different lighting conditions and pallet patterns.

Learning and Skills

Managerial Skills:

  • Ownership and accountability
  • Commitment
  • Work that leaves Positive and definte impact
  • Collaboration with cross-functional teams
  • Time management
  • If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
  • Setting SMART goals
  • Documentation
  • Stephen Covey's Matrix for maximizing productivity
  • ADER framework