Possibilities of a Microfactory in the Assembly of Small Parts and Products - First Results of the M4-project

Abstract

The research in mini, micro and desktop factories originates from early 90's and has continued since then by developing the technological basis and different technological building bricks and applications in the field of high-precision manufacture and assembly of future miniaturized and micro products. This has paved the way to mini, micro and desktop factories which are seen as one potential solution for that kind of production by improving space, energy and material resource utilization and answering to the needs of design for postponement and customer-close customization and personalization. The research efforts done during these years are now increasingly leading also to commercialization and real industrial applications. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the international microfactory research and to introduce in more detail the modular microfactory concept developed in the M4-project.

Electromagnetic modular Smart Surface architecture and control in a microfactory context

“…Then, the research interests related to microfactory have evolved to respond to flexibility requirements by developing modular concepts in order to organize the hardware part of the microfactory [5,8,18]. Now, the majority of the microfactories are designed at the outset for rapid change of the structure in terms of hardware as well as software components such as TUT microfactory [5,37]. The existing microfactories have demonstrated some benefits in saving investments, space, energy and resources.…”

Evolvable Micro Production Systems: Specific needs and differences to macro

“…The first case study used in this paper is the TUT Microfactory, which is a modular desktop factory concept developed at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) [14][15][16][17][18] (see Fig. 2.).…”

Development of system supervision and control software for a micromanipulation system

“…The system achieves 20-micron accuracy that can be upgraded to 200 nm using integrated magnetic sensors. In [8] a micro assembly module structure is developed where every module is run by a dedicated PC104 platform running Linux. Inter module communications are achieved using an RS485 bus, each module is also able to communicate with a master controller over IEEE 802.11.…”