This paper discusses the minimum cutting thickness with a continuous chip in sub-micrometer order precision diamond cutting. An ultra precision cutting model is proposed, in which the tool edge radius and the friction coefficient are the principal factors determining the minimum cutting thickness. The experimental results verify the proposed model and provide various supporting evidence. In order to reduce the minimum cutting thickness a vibration cutting method is applied, and the effects are investigated through a series of experiments under the same conditions as conventional cutting method.

CMP (Chemical-Mechanical Polishing) is a process in which both chemical and mechanical mechanisms act simultaneously to produce the planarized wafer. CMP process is an extensive usage and continuing high growth rates in the semiconductor industry. The understanding of the process, however, is much slower. The nature of material removal from the wafer is still undefined and ambiguous. Material removal rate according to the slurry flow rate is also undefined and ambiguous. Thus, in this study, the basic mechanism of material removal rate as slurry flow rate is defined in terms of energy supply and energy loss.

Laser welding techniques have been characterised for various materials. In this paper, the laser weldability of STS304 stainless steel and Inconel 600 at dissimilar metal welds using a continuous wave Nd:YAG laser are experimentally investigated. Inconel 600 is being used in a steam generator tubing of pressurized water reactor(PWR) exposed to some corrosion. Stress corrosion cracking can occur on this material.
An experimental study was conducted to determine effects of welding parameters, on eliminating or reducing the extent welding zone formation at dissimilar metal welds and to optimize those parameters that have the most influence parameters such as focus length, power, beam speed, shielding gas, and wave length of laser were tested.

Recently, there has been an increasing demand for computer-vision based inspection and/or measurement system as a part of factory automation equipment. Existing manual inspection method can inspect only specific samples and has low measuring accuracy as well as it increases working time. Thus, in order to improve the objectivity and reproducibility, computer-aided analysis method is needed.
In this paper, front and side profile inspection and/or data transfer system are developed using computer-vision during the inspection process on three kinds of pipes coming from a forming line. Straight line and circle are extracted from profiles obtained from vision using Laplace operator. To reduce inspection time, Hough Transform is used with clustering method for straight line detection and the center points and diameters of inner and outer circle are found to determine eccentricity and whether good or bad. Also, an inspection system has been built that each pipe's data and images of good/bad test are stored as files and transferred to the server so that the center can manage them.

This paper presents ESPI system for the measurement of thermal expansion coefficient of STS430 up to 1,000 ℃, Existing methods, strain gauge and moire have the limitation of contact to object and do not supply the coefficient up to 800 ℃. There needs to measure the data up to 800 ℃, because heat resistant materials have high melting temperature up to 1,000 ℃. In previous studies related to thermal strain analysis, the quantitative results have not reported by ESPI at high temperature, yet. In-plane ESPI and vacuum chamber for the reduction of air turbulence and oxidation are designed for the measurement of the coefficient up to 1,000 ℃ and speckle correlation fringe pattern images are processed by commercial image filtering tool-smoothing, thinning and enhancement- to obtain quantitative results, which is compared with references data. The comparison shows two data are agreed within 4.1 % blow 600 ℃ however, there is some difference up to 600 ℃. Also, the incremental ratio of the coefficient is changed up to 800 ℃. The reason is the phase transformation of STS430 probably begins at 800 ℃.

A metrological atomic force microscope (M-AFM) was developed for the length measurements of nanometer range, through the modification of a commercial AFM. To eliminate nonlinearity and crosstalk of the PZT tube scanner of the commercial AFM, a two-axis flexure hinge scanner employing built-in capacitive sensors is used for X-Y motion instead of PZT tube scanner. Then two-dimensional displacement of the scanner is measured using two-axis heterodyne laser interferometer to ensure the meter-traceability. Through the measurements of several specimens, we could verify the elimination of nonlinearity and crosstalk. The uncertainty of length measurements was estimated according to the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement. Among several sources of uncertainty, the primary one is the drift of laser interferometer output, which occurs mainly from the variation of refractive index of air and the thermal stability. The Abbe error, which is proportional to the measured length, is another primary uncertainty source coming from the parasitic motion of the scanner. The expanded uncertainty (k ＝ 2) of length measurements using the M-AFM is √(4.26)²＋(2.84×10－⁴×L)² (㎚), where L is the measured length in ㎚. We also measured the pitch of one-dimensional grating and compared the results with those obtained by optical diffractometry. The relative difference between these results is less than 0.01 %.

In this paper we present a new real-time visual servoing unit for laparoscopic surgery. This unit can automatically control laparoscope manipulator through visual tracking of laparoscopic surgical tool. For the tracking, we present two-stage adaptive CONDENSATION(conditional density propagation) algorithm to extract the accurate position of the surgical tool tip from a surgical image sequence in real-time. This algorithm can be adaptable to abrupt change of laparoscope illumination. For the control, we present virtual damper system to control a laparoscope manipulator safely and stably. This system causes the laparoscope to move under constraint of the virtual dampers which are linked to the four sides of image. The visual servoing unit operates the manipulator in real-time with locating the surgical tool in the center of image. The experimental results show that the proposed visual tracking algorithm is highly robust and the controlled manipulator can present stable view with safe.

TFLIM(Transverse Flux Linear Induction Motor), making its closed magnetic path with the direction of the traveling field orthogonal, had been developed to decrease an edge effect of the general induction motor. To control the levitation force and the thrust force on the secondary part of TFLIM independently, the various methodologies have been presented. When we try to achieve the independent control using only the multi-phase inputs assigned in the stator coils as an ap-proach, in which condition we can minimize the coupling effect between two forces? In this paper, we show the qualita-tive influence of a slip frequency, an ac magnitude, a de offset superposed in the ac power, and a major parameter of TFLIM on the couple through the computer simulation. And to realize the independent motions between levitation and thrust motion without any auxiliary means for isolation of the secondary part of TFLIM, the decouple compensator is suggested, including the experimental results.

This paper proposes precision evaluation method for the positioning error of three-DOF translational parallel mechanism. The proposed method uses conventional CMM as metrology equipment to measure the position of end-effector. In order to obtain accurate measurement data from CMM, the transform relationship between the coordinate system of the parallel mechanism and the CMM coordinate system must be identified. For this purpose, a new coordinate referencing (or coordinate system identification) technique is presented. By using this technique accurate coordinate transformation relationships are efficiently established. According to these coordinate transformation relationships, an equation to calculate error components at any arbitrary position of the end-effector is derived. In addition, mathematical fitting models to represent the position error components in the two-dimensional workspace of the parallel mechanism are also constructed based on response surface methodology. The proposed error evaluation method proves its effectiveness through the experimental results and its application to real three-DOF parallel mechanism.

In this paper, a decentralized adaptive controller is proposed to control robot manipulators which are governed by highly nonlinear dynamic equations. The controller is computationally efficient since it does not require mathematical model or parameter values of robot manipulators. The stability of the manipulators with the controller is proved by Lyapunov theory. The results of numerical simulations show that the system is stable, and has excellent trajectory tracking performance.