Frontiers of Assembly and Manufacturing: Selected papers from ISAM'09'

The technologies for product assembly and manufacturing evolve along with the advancement of enabling technologies such as material science, robotics, machine intelligence as well as information and communication. Furthermore, they may be subject to fundamental changes due to the shift in key product features and/or - gineering requirements. The enabling technologies emerging offer new opportunities for moving up the level of automation, optimization and reliability in product assembly and ma- facturing beyond what have been possible. We see assembly and manufacturing becoming more Intelligent with the perception-driven robotic autonomy, more flexible with the human-robot coupled collaboration in work cells, and more in- grated in scale and complexity under the distributed and networked frameworks. On the other hand, the shift in key product features and engineering requirements dictates the new technologies and tools for assembly and manufacturing to be - veloped. This may be exemplified by a high complexity of micro/nano system products integrated and packaged in 3D with various heterogeneous parts, com- nents, and interconnections, including electrical, optical, mechanical as well as fluidic means.

The objective of this volume is to show how the assembly and manufacturing technologies evolve along with the advancement of enabling technologies and how the emergence of a high complexity of micro/nano system products dictate the development of new technologies and tools for their assembly and manufacturing. To this end, we have chosen 19 papers, top-rated yet relevant, out of the 76 papers accepted to present at the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Manufacturing. The 19 papers chosen are further revised into the final manuscripts for book chapters that are organized into three parts: Part I: Fixture, Grasping and Manipulation in Assembly and Manufacturing, Part II: Micro/Macro Assembly and Disassembly, and Part III: Manufacturing System Scheduling and Control. Part I, II and III are reviewed and organized by the co-editors of this volume, Prof. Raul Suarez, Prof. Sukhan Lee and Dr. Byungwook Choi, respectively.