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Repetitive movements have been found to affect assembly operations in many ways such as increasing the risk of injuries, increasing the cost of production, and reduction in the quality of products. This has been a big problem for industries. The method adopted by these studies seems to pose more injuries to workers as workers need to perform a task to the extreme level of pain to determine if repetitive injuries will occur or not. The method of modeling and simulation of human operations is a valid technique that is effective, but could be complex. Some of the modeling and simulation software packages make use of such guidelines as NIOSH, Snook and Ciriello, RULA, REBA, and Biomechanics single action analysis. However, various applications of these tools in actual ergonomic studies tend to be very time consuming and trivial due to the lack of a valid framework to guide the process.

One of the key requirements for future manufacturing system is to cope with changes and uncertainties quickly and cost-efficiently. Reconfigurable machines are appropriate choices to meet this requirement. The application of a reconfigurable machine involves frequent reconfigurations to respond to task changes. Reconfiguration needs an efficient tool to compare a large number of design candidates in terms of the specified design requirements. Little effort has been found in developing this type of tools. In this paper, we report our works in the following aspects: (i) an overview and summary of existing works in this area, (ii) some observations of the design features of reconfigurable systems, (iii) the definition of the requirements of the integrated design environment, and (iv) an example of developing the integrated environment for reconfigurable tripod-based machines

Coating automation of a complex product family with unknown features is investigated. A CAD and scanner-based robotic coating system is proposed. The system is capable of creating robotic programs for different products automatically. Unpredicted features are detected by sensors when a product is loaded into the system. Other features are known from the product CAD model. All of the features are merged together to create an accurate surface model. The system generates robotic paths and trajectories based on the surface model. A system framework and methodology for path and trajectory generation is proposed.

This paper presents the conceptual design of 5dof tripod-based parallel kinematic machine system to be applied in the magnesium alloy castings finishing industry. The design starts from the industrial requirements and process needs, then propose the most promising architecture and mobility. With the structure, kinematic/dynamic analysis is conducted, and stiffness model is established, it can be further used for stiffness control and design optimization. The genetic algorithms is applied for structure optimization. Finally, an experiment of prototype is setup to validate the methods and models.