In this paper, we present a novel Movable Gripper (MovGrip) which targets on climbing non-enclosable rectangular trusses such as bridges and space stations. It is designed with a transformation mechanism which provides the features of parallel grippers, rotatory grippers, and active wheels. For truss climbing, MovGrip acts as a parallel gripper which allows the change in gripping width according to different size of trusses. Since MovGrip is equipped with active wheels, fast climbing motion can therefore be realized. Moreover, MovGrip can be transformed into a mobile platform which is suitable for the navigation on ground. It weighs only 500 grams with a climbing speed of 3 cm/s. To maintain the climbing stability, we steer the rotation axis of wheels. By this, a directional pulling force (from MovGrip to truss surface) can be distributed from the drive force of wheels which pulls MovGrip towards the truss while climbing. Experimental results show that tilting of MovGrip can be auto-adjusted based on the proposed design. Also, it is shown that the load carrying capability of MovGrip is approximately 1 kg which is 2 times of its weight.

In this paper, we present an innovative design of a solder paste inspection device which can be practically integrated into existing solder paste printing machines. Since solder paste inspection systems usually occupy a large space in vertical direction, we designed a mirror box that can re-direct the transmission of fringe pattern. In this way, a new parallel solder paste inspection device with a significant reduction in the vertical constraint is developed. We also developed a hybrid weighting algorithm that applied the distance and fringe contrast to acquire the height of solder pastes. Furthermore, we developed an algorithm that generates the 2-D image from the fringe pattern images during the 4-steps algorithm. It gives benefit (time for solder paste inspection) to traditional approach that uses some special lighting systems to create the 2-D image. Experimental results show our device can inspect the 20mm times 20mm PCB area within 2 seconds and the maximum standard deviation for the average height is 3 mum.