Development of an integrated robotic polishing system

This thesis presents research carried out as part of a project undertaken in fulfilment of the requirements of Loughborough University for the award of Philosophical Doctorate. The main focus of this research is to investigate and develop an appropriate level of automation to the existing manual finishing operations of small metallic components to achieve required surface quality and to remove superficial defects. In the manufacturing industries, polishing processes play a vital role in the development of high precision products, to give a desired surface finish, remove defects, break sharp edges, extend the working life cycle, and meet mechanical specification. The polishing operation is generally done at the final stage of the manufacturing process and can represent up to a third of the production time. Despite the growth automated technology in industry, polishing processes are still mainly carried out manually, due to the complexity and constraints of the process. Manual polishing involves a highly qualified worker polishing the workpiece by hand. These processes are very labour intensive, highly skill dependent, costly, error-prone, environmentally hazardous due to abrasive dust, and - in some cases - inefficient with long process times. In addition, the quality of the finishing is dependent on the training, experience, fatigue, physical ability, and expertise of the operator. Therefore, industries are seeking alternative solutions to be implemented within their current processes. These solutions are mainly aimed at replacing the human operator to improve the health and safety of their workforce and improve their competitiveness. Some automated solutions have already been proposed to assist or replace manual polishing processes. These solutions provide limited capabilities for specific processes or components, and a lack of flexibility and dexterity. One of the reasons for their lack of success is identified as neglecting the study and implementing the manual operations. This research initially hypothesised that for an effective development, an automated polishing system should be designed based on the manual polishing operations. Therefore, a successful implementation of an automated polishing system requires a thorough understanding of the polishing process and their operational parameters. This study began by collaborating with an industrial polishing company. The research was focused on polishing complex small components, similar to the parts typically used in the aerospace industry. The high level business processes of the polishing company were capture through several visits to the site. The low level operational parameters and the understanding of the manual operations were also captured through development of a devices that was used by the expert operators. A number of sensors were embedded to the device to facilitate recording the manual operations. For instance, the device captured the force applied by the operator (avg. 10 N) and the cycle time (e.g. 1 pass every 5 sec.). The capture data was then interpreted to manual techniques and polishing approaches that were used in developing a proof-of-concept Integrated Robotic Polishing System (IRPS). The IRPS was tested successfully through several laboratory based experiments by expert operators. The experiment results proved the capability of the proposed system in polishing a variety of part profiles, without pre-existing geometrical information about the parts. One of the main contributions made by this research is to propose a novel approach for automated polishing operations. The development of an integrated robotic polishing system, based on the research findings, uses a set of smart sensors and a force-position-by-increment control algorithm, and transpose the way that skilled workers carry out polishing processes

A study of the viscosities and densities of some binary and ternary regular liquid mixtures at different temperature levels.

The viscosities and densities of ten binary subsystems of the quinary system: heptane, octane, cyclohexane, toluene, and ethylbenzene were measured and reported over the entire composition range at 293.15, 298.15, 308.15, and 313.15 K. In addition, the viscosities and densities of the binary and ternary subsystems of the quinary system: hexane, octane, cyclohexane, toluene, and ethylbenzene were measured and reported at 293.15 and 298.15 K. The experimental data obtained during the course of the study were employed to test the predictive capabilities of five viscosity models available in the literature; viz., the generalized McAllister model, the pseudo-binary McAllister model, The group contribution GC-UNIMOD model, the generalized corresponding state principle model (GCSP), and the Allan and Teja correlation. These models were selected since they are widely used in the literature. The results of testing indicated that the generalized McAllister model predicted the experimental data much better than the other models.Dept. of Environmental Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .A44. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0379. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

A biomechanical and psychophysical examination of fastener initiations in automotive assembly.

The purpose of the current study was to determine acceptable human tolerance limits for a fastener initiation task, which is commonly performed in the automotive industry. A biomechanical and psychophysical methodology was utilized to examine 24 non-skilled female subjects while performing fastener initiation tasks on a simulation device. Three wrist postures (neutral, flexion and extension) in combination with two fastener sizes (large: 10 mm in depth and 20 mm in diameter; small: 5 mm in depth and 10 mm in diameter) were the conditions examined. Fastener initiations per minute, duration of each fastener initiation and the quantity of efforts (individual fastener rotations that comprise each Fastener Initiation) within each fastener initiation were the kinematic measures. Electromyography was also employed to provide data from the muscular activity of the forearm and hands while performing the task. Repeated measures ANOVA with Tukey\u27s significance post hoc test were used to determine any significance within the measured variables (p \u3c 0.05). This study has provided recommendations on acceptable human tolerances for the task of fastener initiations used in the manufacturing industry. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .C67. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-05, page: 1707. Adviser: Jim Potvin. Thesis (M.H.K.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Designing to Support Workspace Awareness in Remote Collaboration using 2D Interactive Surfaces

Increasing distributions of the global workforce are leading to collaborative workamong remote coworkers. The emergence of such remote collaborations is essentiallysupported by technology advancements of screen-based devices ranging from tabletor laptop to large displays. However, these devices, especially personal and mobilecomputers, still suffer from certain limitations caused by their form factors, that hinder supporting workspace awareness through non-verbal communication suchas bodily gestures or gaze. This thesis thus aims to design novel interfaces andinteraction techniques to improve remote coworkers’ workspace awareness throughsuch non-verbal cues using 2D interactive surfaces.The thesis starts off by exploring how visual cues support workspace awareness infacilitated brainstorming of hybrid teams of co-located and remote coworkers. Basedon insights from this exploration, the thesis introduces three interfaces for mobiledevices that help users maintain and convey their workspace awareness with their coworkers. The first interface is a virtual environment that allows a remote person to effectively maintain his/her awareness of his/her co-located collaborators’ activities while interacting with the shared workspace. To help a person better express his/her hand gestures in remote collaboration using a mobile device, the second interfacepresents a lightweight add-on for capturing hand images on and above the device’sscreen; and overlaying them on collaborators’ device to improve their workspace awareness. The third interface strategically leverages the entire screen space of aconventional laptop to better convey a remote person’s gaze to his/her co-locatedcollaborators. Building on the top of these three interfaces, the thesis envisions an interface that supports a person using a mobile device to effectively collaborate with remote coworkers working with a large display.Together, these interfaces demonstrate the possibilities to innovate on commodity devices to offer richer non-verbal communication and better support workspace awareness in remote collaboration

Workflow Provenance: from Modeling to Reporting

Workflow provenance is a crucial part of a workflow system as it enables data lineage analysis, error tracking, workflow monitoring, usage pattern discovery, and so on. Integrating provenance into a workflow system or modifying a workflow system to capture or analyze different provenance information is burdensome, requiring extensive development because provenance mechanisms rely heavily on the modelling, architecture, and design of the workflow system. Various tools and technologies exist for logging events in a software system. Unfortunately, logging tools and technologies are not designed for capturing and analyzing provenance information. Workflow provenance is not only about logging, but also about retrieving workflow related information from logs. In this work, we propose a taxonomy of provenance questions and guided by these questions, we created a workflow programming model 'ProvMod' with a supporting run-time library to provide automated provenance and log analysis for any workflow system. The design and provenance mechanism of ProvMod is based on recommendations from prominent research and is easy to integrate into any workflow system. ProvMod offers Neo4j graph database support to manage semi-structured heterogeneous JSON logs. The log structure is adaptable to any NoSQL technology. For each provenance question in our taxonomy, ProvMod provides the answer with data visualization using Neo4j and the ELK Stack. Besides analyzing performance from various angles, we demonstrate the ease of integration by integrating ProvMod with Apache Taverna and evaluate ProvMod usability by engaging users. Finally, we present two Software Engineering research cases (clone detection and architecture extraction) where our proposed model ProvMod and provenance questions taxonomy can be applied to discover meaningful insights

Human-Centered Automation for Resilience in Acquiring Construction Field Information

abstract: Resilient acquisition of timely, detailed job site information plays a pivotal role in maintaining the productivity and safety of construction projects that have busy schedules, dynamic workspaces, and unexpected events. In the field, construction information acquisition often involves three types of activities including sensor-based inspection, manual inspection, and communication. Human interventions play critical roles in these three types of field information acquisition activities. A resilient information acquisition system is needed for safer and more productive construction. The use of various automation technologies could help improve human performance by proactively providing the needed knowledge of using equipment, improve the situation awareness in multi-person collaborations, and reduce the mental workload of operators and inspectors. Unfortunately, limited studies consider human factors in automation techniques for construction field information acquisition. Fully utilization of the automation techniques requires a systematical synthesis of the interactions between human, tasks, and construction workspace to reduce the complexity of information acquisition tasks so that human can finish these tasks with reliability. Overall, such a synthesis of human factors in field data collection and analysis is paving the path towards “Human-Centered Automation” (HCA) in construction management. HCA could form a computational framework that supports resilient field data collection considering human factors and unexpected events on dynamic job sites. This dissertation presented an HCA framework for resilient construction field information acquisition and results of examining three HCA approaches that support three use cases of construction field data collection and analysis. The first HCA approach is an automated data collection planning method that can assist 3D laser scan planning of construction inspectors to achieve comprehensive and efficient data collection. The second HCA approach is a Bayesian model-based approach that automatically aggregates the common sense of people from the internet to identify job site risks from a large number of job site pictures. The third HCA approach is an automatic communication protocol optimization approach that maximizes the team situation awareness of construction workers and leads to the early detection of workflow delays and critical path changes. Data collection and simulation experiments extensively validate these three HCA approaches.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201

NASA SBIR abstracts of 1991 phase 1 projects

The objectives of 301 projects placed under contract by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are described. These projects were selected competitively from among proposals submitted to NASA in response to the 1991 SBIR Program Solicitation. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 301, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference of the 1991 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA Field Center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number are included

The NASA SBIR product catalog

The purpose of this catalog is to assist small business firms in making the community aware of products emerging from their efforts in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. It contains descriptions of some products that have advanced into Phase 3 and others that are identified as prospective products. Both lists of products in this catalog are based on information supplied by NASA SBIR contractors in responding to an invitation to be represented in this document. Generally, all products suggested by the small firms were included in order to meet the goals of information exchange for SBIR results. Of the 444 SBIR contractors NASA queried, 137 provided information on 219 products. The catalog presents the product information in the technology areas listed in the table of contents. Within each area, the products are listed in alphabetical order by product name and are given identifying numbers. Also included is an alphabetical listing of the companies that have products described. This listing cross-references the product list and provides information on the business activity of each firm. In addition, there are three indexes: one a list of firms by states, one that lists the products according to NASA Centers that managed the SBIR projects, and one that lists the products by the relevant Technical Topics utilized in NASA's annual program solicitation under which each SBIR project was selected

Robotic manipulators for single access surgery

This thesis explores the development of cooperative robotic manipulators for enhancing surgical precision and patient outcomes in single-access surgery and, specifically, Transanal Endoscopic Microsurgery (TEM). During these procedures, surgeons manipulate a heavy set of instruments via a mechanical clamp inserted in the patient’s body through a surgical port, resulting in imprecise movements, increased patient risks, and increased operating time. Therefore, an articulated robotic manipulator with passive joints is initially introduced, featuring built-in position and force sensors in each joint and electronic joint brakes for instant lock/release capability. The articulated manipulator concept is further improved with motorised joints, evolving into an active tool holder. The joints allow the incorporation of advanced robotic capabilities such as ultra-lightweight gravity compensation and hands-on kinematic reconfiguration, which can optimise the placement of the tool holder in the operating theatre. Due to the enhanced sensing capabilities, the application of the active robotic manipulator was further explored in conjunction with advanced image guidance approaches such as endomicroscopy. Recent advances in probe-based optical imaging such as confocal endomicroscopy is making inroads in clinical uses. However, the challenging manipulation of imaging probes hinders their practical adoption. Therefore, a combination of the fully cooperative robotic manipulator with a high-speed scanning endomicroscopy instrument is presented, simplifying the incorporation of optical biopsy techniques in routine surgical workflows. Finally, another embodiment of a cooperative robotic manipulator is presented as an input interface to control a highly-articulated robotic instrument for TEM. This master-slave interface alleviates the drawbacks of traditional master-slave devices, e.g., using clutching mechanics to compensate for the mismatch between slave and master workspaces, and the lack of intuitive manipulation feedback, e.g. joint limits, to the user. To address those drawbacks a joint-space robotic manipulator is proposed emulating the kinematic structure of the flexible robotic instrument under control.Open Acces