Pete Van Camp played detective before he acted as a manufacturing engineer for his graduate capstone project.
His project involved upgrading a Fanuc industrial robot, which had been sitting idle for a short time in the Fabrication and Robotics Lab located in RIT’s College of Engineering Technology. Limited documentation about functions, missing cables and components, and fewer technical people from the company to provide service support were just a few of the barriers Van Camp encountered as he began.
“It was probably a year of mystery before I really got into doing any of the work,” said Van Camp. “It was a lot bigger project than I expected. Most of what came with the robot didn’t work, it was missing a bunch of cables to get the robot welding system functional. I didn’t know that much about welding, let alone robotic welding.”
He reached out to robot…
