Design and development of an automated glove inspection machine

Abstract

Gloves are commonly used as personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect humans from contact of contamination of chemical substances and infection of disease such as Covid-19. The gloves markets including household gloves upsurged exponentially during the Covid-19 outbreak as the concern and awareness of safety and hygiene rises in the community. Hence, to ensure the safety and reliability of the product, quality control of the gloves must be efficient and accurate. However, most of the household glove manufacturers are still using manual visual inspection for quality control, which is unreliable and expensive as cost of labor are gradually increasing too. Therefore, the aim of the project is to develop an automated machine that can inspect varied sizes of household gloves and segregate the defective with non-defective gloves. With the implementation of automated glove inspection machine, the efficiency and return-of-investment for the glove inspection process can be increased. Throughout the project, the 3D model of the inspection device was developed and fabricated using 3D printing technology. Automated system of glove inspection and segregation was implemented on the inspection device. Then, the inspection device was tested on industrial defective gloves and self-made defective gloves with different diameters of pinholes. Results show that the inspection device was able to segregate all defective gloves from the non-defective gloves. The inspection device was duplicated with four more sets and mounted onto the rotating platform to complete the automated glove inspection machine. The final automated glove inspection machine can inspect and segregate five household gloves consecutively on each cycle to increase the efficiency and ROI of the quality control.