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Laser milling is a recent process in mould making, providing several advantages over traditional mould making technologies by reducing manufacturing time, shortening the number of machining operations and avoiding expensive electrodes. This paper investigates the influence of the operating conditions on both the surface quality and material removal for two types of materials commonly used in mould making.

Laser scanning strategies and operating parameters like scanning speed and laser frequency and power were tested, regarding surface quality and material removal rate. The most representative parameter of the real surface quality, R_k, the core roughness parameter, is used to characterise the surface finishing on all cavities.

The findings of this research work suggest that it is possible to significantly reduce processing time by increasing the hatch spacing up to a value close to the laser beam spot diameter, without compromising surface quality. Lower pulse frequencies and laser power are more appropriate whenever surface quality is an issue. Higher material removal rates are achieved by increasing both the pulse frequency till an optimum value and laser power. The increase of scanning speed reduces the material removal rate by decreasing the overlap degree between individual laser pulses.

The originality is to correlate the influence of the operating conditions of laser milling on both the surface quality and material removal for different types of materials.

To report on the design and development of an automated circuit breaker panel cover assembly system. The system employs two robotically controlled spot welding heads and a robotic finished workpiece unloading station.

A major electrical equipment builder turned to a skilled system integrator to design a system to meet a specific productivity goal and handle a wide family of product. The system integrator turned to several highly qualified subcontractors to supply key portions of the system. As a team then selected the welding heads, controls, pallet transport systems and robots and developed a system controller, parts holding devices and software for the application.

A combination of some manually operations with automated spot welding and robotic workpiece handling equipment can produce outstanding productivity improvements.

A careful selection of a qualified system integrator with experience in the type of application, teamed with subcontractors skilled in all the skills needed for the project can help insure an outcome that meets initial productivity objectives.

Seeing the results of others in tackling what may seem like a hard to automate application can provide a road map to success.

To show how advances in machine vision technology are of particular benefit to automated assembly.

The review concentrates on algorithms, cost effectiveness, and communications aspects of currently available commercial systems.

Vision is now very robust, affordable, and capable of being used at every stage in the assembly process.

The vision industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace and readers who may have been disappointed when they investigated the technology only a few years ago should learn how today's systems have improved.

Details the implementation of six sigma at one UK based manufacturing company.

Describes how and why one company has introduced six sigma, and looks at a number of specific improvement projects – the approach taken, the common fault causes and the benefits gained from introducing new practices.

Six sigma has enabled the company to eliminate a wide range of long standing process variation problems. The projects undertaken highlight the importance of a structured process and the importance of data collection. Only when working with the facts, rather than on “gut feeling” do the real causes become clear and solutions effective.

Brings to the attention of managers how six sigma can be used to enhance existing improvement efforts, and uses specific examples to show how the approach can be used to tackle long standing, and often hidden, quality issues.

To highlight an innovative approach to the construction of factory production equipment.

Explains the philosophy of the company and catalogues its range of components, which combine to build a wide assortment of industrial equipment.

Careful design has produced components that are easy to assemble and yield rugged structures, whilst their interconnectivity has dramatically reduced the number of parts needed and increased the variety of constructions possible.

This approach saves customers time and logistical effort.

Makes assembly engineers aware of an alternative to welded steel construction.

Semiconductor manufacturing industry requires highly accurate robot operation with short install/setup downtime.

We develop a fast, low cost and easy‐to‐operate calibration system for wafer‐handling robots. The system is defined by a fixture and a simple compensation algorithm. Given robot repeatability, end effector uncertainties, and the tolerance requirements of wafer placement points, we derive fixture design and placement specifications based on a statistical tolerance model.

By employing the fixture‐based calibration, we successfully relax the tolerance requirement of the end effector by 20 times.

Semiconductor manufacturing requires fast and easy‐to‐operate calibration systems for wafer‐handling robots. In this paper, we describe a new methodology to solve this problem using fixtures. We develop fixture design criteria and a simple compensate algorithm to satisfy calibration requirements. We also verify our approach by a physical example.

The aim of this research is to investigate whether a collection of tiny, resource constrained, microcontrollers that communicate with each other over wireless links can perform rigorous automation tasks.

We identify three building blocks that are necessary to obtain large conveyor systems. The operation of each building block is regulated by a local microcontroller and the microcontrollers interact via wireless links to coordinate the operations across blocks. We define the actions necessary in each block and discuss two example applications for this method.

It is necessary to fundamentally revisit how automation applications are engineered to get the benefits of new technologies. We show that the three blocks that we call segment, turnaround and crossover are sufficient to obtain a large variety of conveyor systems. By embedding the blocks in a grid, we can simplify the design of the conveyor systems.

Extensions of this research to identify a set of building blocks for discrete automation applications and motion control applications could provide new insights, architectures and methods for future automation systems.

When fully realized, this approach can save engineering costs, commissioning costs and provide new approaches for managing faults in automation systems.

The three building blocks for conveyor systems and the method of programming the blocks that allows the blocks to be configured in a variety of ways to realize conveyor systems for many applications.

The brake connector of an automobile is one important part in the brake system. How to measure the matching surface quality is a problem, because the matching surface is a cone surface and has a deep aperture structure.

A new measurement system is presented which could assure illumination and image with a special beam splitter. The worker could observe the matching surface by better image.

More objective evaluation is given with image processing method.

Now, this measurement system is used by Toyota (Tianjin) company and satisfied result is obtained.

This paper is an original work and focuses on an important issue in automobile production.

Vision guided robotics (VGR) is a fast growing technology and a way to reduce manpower and retain production, especially in countries with high manufacturing overheads and labour costs. This paper aims to provide information on a new VGR system.

The paper describes the new automation system of the Swedish company SVIA.

Shows that the need to position components to a set pick‐up position is eliminated – the vision system determining the position of randomly fed products by a recycling conveyor system. The vision system and control software gives the robot exact coordinates of the components, which are spread out randomly beneath the camera field of vision, enabling the robot arm to move to a selected component and pick from the conveyor belt.

Describes how the modules are easy to utilise when products or production lines change.