INTELLIGENT ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS

This book deals with a key area of industrial robotics – theautomation of small batch assembly. Assembly imparts enormous addedvalue but turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to automate. Thework presented here, all from the Centre for Intelligent Systems atthe University of Wales, Aberystwyth, addresses this issue and showsways in which the difficulties may be reduced through systematicarchitectural designs and specific structures for interfacing andcontrolling sensory-actuation systems. The book develops three mainthemes: a task-centred approach to robotic assembly, explicitreasoning techniques for fault diagnosis and error handling; andsensor-actuator integration methods. These are vital topics for thoseconcerned with flexible automation and robotics.