The existing medical mask manufacturing machines are rudimentary and require several operators and manual adjustments to keep operational. The Challenge was to design and build a medical mask making machine that was fully automated, only required a single operator to run, and improving the throughput by 50% or more, while simplifying the design.

We designed and built a complete machine from scratch. This included designing and building the electronics and controls (PCBs from scratch), programming the control firmware, creating a control software platform to monitor and set variables on the discrete control systems, design all of the mechanical components, from the fabric handling system to the ear loop welding station, and everything in between. We iterated and redesigned the system to assure performance metrics were met and tuned the system during the extensive system testing.