Development of Automatic PLC-based Colour Object Sorting and Drilling Line Prototype

This paper presents an automatic prototype drilling and sorting line using programmable logic control (PLC). The main objective is to design and apply PLC in order to develop an automatic drilling and sorting systems with different sizes. The condition for drilling is to pierce a hole in the black and white objects and to drill a hole in the green and blue objects. The automatic drilling and sorting system prototype will be controlled on screen. This prototype system consists of PLC MITSUMISHI as the main controller, a stepping motor to move the drilling motor for drilling the parts, and to communicate between the users and system through GT SoftGOT 2000 on computer. There are two modes of the automatic prototype drilling and sorting line as the manual mode and automatic mode. The experimental results show that the error of drilling distance is about 0.2-0.3 mm. The automatic drilling and sorting machine can work accurately in both manual and automatic mode, which can be integrated into the large-scale of industrial implementation.