Abstract
A main distributing frame(MDF) is an interface unit that is used to connect office equipment cables in a telephone company to subscriber cables. Until now, there is no automated switching system for MDFs in Korea. Manual handling of an MDF has some drawbacks; It is time-consuming, very cumbersome, and expensive. It also makes maintenance hard. An automated main distributing frame system is proposed and commercialized in Japan. In that system, a robot gripper inserts connecting pins into the cross point holes of a matrix board, which reveals several disadvantages in the aspects of space, maintenance, fault tolerance, and economical efficiency. This paper describes a newly developed robotic switch board system for MDFs. In the developed system, switches are placed at the cross point of a matrix board. There is one robot in between two switch units, so one robot deals with two switch units. In the system, positioning the robot, opening and closing switches can be done by using only a pair of motors and a pair of solenoids. The newly developed system is compact in size, reduces cost, and shows high reliability.
