Connect your UltraFLEX to a Universal Robot | Teradyne

With the Industrial 4.0 movement, we see more and more advanced digital technologies being produced, and more and more integration of such intelligent technologies into manufacturing and industrial processes today. In 2023, there was an opportunity to explore a project in the areas of Robotics and Automation for a customer. In collaboration with an engineering team from Universal Robots (UR), we (the Strategic Software – Production Integration Team) have prototyped a tailor-made solution for a use case envisioned by the customer. Through this work of integrating UltraFLEX IG-XL with the UR5e program, we were able to able to direct and control the UR cobot from the IG-XL system – automating the processes of picking, placing, testing, and sorting of devices. As you can imagine before, how hand test would go is have an engineer use a pop-sucker to go pick up a chip from a tray, move it to the test head of the tester, secure it in place, then move to the tester desktop to hit run to start testing. And once it is done, the engineer would have to go to the test head, disengage the lid, use the pop-sucker to pick up the chip and bring it over to an output tray. But now with this solution prototyped, everything is handled by the UltraFLEX tester and the UR. From input tray to a pre-aligner, to the test head. And once testing is done, the robot will pick up the chip from the test head and send it to the designated output tray based on bin results. The aim of this paper is to introduce the work of the integration effort and spread knowledge about it in hopes that this would serve as a springboard to other integrative applications between Teradyne products in the future and potentially create new businesses to offer customer efficiency through automation between Teradyne’s products.