Development of an automatic Foi Thong rolling machine

“Foi Thong”, literally meaning golden threads, is one of the most famous Thai desserts inspired by Portuguese sweet centuries ago. The threads are made by pouring egg streams into boiling syrup. Afterwards, the threads those have been set will be removed from the syrup and pass through the desired shaping process. In general, in this industry, producing Foi Thong is labor intensive and skillful workers with high dexterity are required. Due to the lack of skillful workers, an automatic Foi Thong rolling machine is developed to resolve this issue. The machine is an XYZ robot equipped with a special designed gripper for manipulating bunch of the threads. The movement of the machine replicates the human workers. A force sensor is equipped in order to control the characteristics of the rolls, including texture and stiffness of the threads. The machine has to roll a piece of Foi Thong automatically and control force that effect to Foi Thong roll. This machine can roll the Foi Thong and control force as expect. The experiment and machine fabrication are presented in this article.