A robotic manipulator for handling TLD badges

A prototype system for automatic handling of Harshaw/Bicron (now ThermoFisher Scientific) thermoluminescent dosimetry (TLD) badges, which is based on a robotic arm, was designed and built. The robot performs the loading and unloading of the TLD cards in the badges and transports them between the loading/unloading station and magazine stations. For quality assurance, a sticker containing the worker's details printed in barcode format was added to the badge. Automatic on-line identification is performed for checking the correlation between the badge and the TLD card number.