Engineers seek to reduce the cost of solar-thermal central tower systems by reducing the cost of the heliostat field. Lower-cost heliostats can be achieved by accepting lower precision in manufacture and installation. Automated alignment methods can then be used to correct pointing errors due to misalignments after the heliostat is installed, to obtain and maintain the required pointing accurac...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is developing a specification for a standard format to represent machine tool performance test data. This data is used for machine acceptance, predictive maintenance, error compensation, and to evaluate the capability of a machine or contractor to manufacture parts to specified tolerances. This paper describes the implementation of a JAV...

Industry throughout the world is faced with a common problem that of the disposal of waste materials from manufacturing processes. In the case of the dairy industry, one such 'waste' which is produced in enormous quantities is the whey resulting from cheese and casein manufacture. In the 1996/97 season alone it is estimated that around five billion litres of whey were produced in New Zealand. I...

Iron occurs mainly as oxide ores, though it is also found in smaller quantities as its sulfide and carbonate. These other ores are usually first roasted to convert them into the oxide. On a world scale the most important ore is haematite (Fe2O3), but in New Zealand the starting materials are magnetite (Fe3O4) and titanomagnetite (Fe2TiO4). The oxides are reduced with carbon from coal, through t...

This project is aimed to study and manufacture a novel autochecking and punch system of FPC, which is based on computer vision, image processing and automatic control technique. The system realizes the auto-punching process by a serial of workflow, including catching material, taking photos, punching, dropping material and home moving. Coordinate calibration is the core of automatic punch syste...

A simple, but eeective, method of calibrating a multi-manipulator robotic system is introduced. The algorithm uses precisely machined calibration plates which are inexpensive to manufacture and requires no measuring instrumentation. The kinematic model parameters are solved by taking advantage of the fact that the homogeneous transformation around a closed chain equals the identity matrix and d...