At its Deeside plant in North Wales, Pilkington Micronics produces 0.4‐4mm glass panels for use in LCD and emissive displays for watches, calculators and laptop computers. The material for these panels is cut to size, ground and packed at Deeside. Describes the automation of the packing...

The current state in the application of lasers for cutting and welding is reviewed. Most cutting operations are performed on specifically developed laser machine tools such as the Trumpf Lasercell and its application in the development of trim shapes and low volume panel production at a...

Reports on the Robot & Automation show held at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre alongside the MACH 2000 and other principal manufacturing shows. Some of the robot applications developed by exhibiting systems integrators are described including installations for monitoring clean room...

Describes the background and development of a battery powered domestic robot vacuum cleaner. Major problems that have been solved are having the ability to clean a whole room without human intervention, and cleaning as well as a mains‐powered manual cleaner. A total of 50 on‐board sensors...

An extremely high‐pressure jet of water is an efficient method of cutting soft materials, and combining the waterjet process with industrial robots is an economic alternative to the traditional punch tool method of producing complex‐shaped components for car interiors, such as floor carpets,...

A demonstrator cell has been developed at Airbus UK for building large aircraft wing box assemblies by a partnership of six companies partly funded under the UK government’s civil aviation research and demonstration (CARAD) programme. The cell has shown the feasibility of assembling the three...

Describes an installation at Aerospace Composite Technologies in Luton to apply ice protection heating elements to the leading edge portion of the main rotor blade fitted to the Westland EH101 military helicopter. The elements comprising a layer of porous conductive metal are plasma sprayed...

“Productivity Partnerships”, a regulars series of demonstrations held at The 600 Centre in Shepshed, saw the UK launch of a new machine loading robot system by Fanuc Robotics. A description is given of the rail‐mounted 6‐axis robot together with some of the claimed benefits. It is a...

Describes some of the new products at the Surface World exhibition held at the NEC in Birmingham, UK. Three of the mainstream robot vendors supplying painting systems were at the show and each launched a new product. They also displayed a trend to the growth in the coating of plastic components....