Factory and facility automation has been widely implemented since the revolution of computers. A variety of automatic material processing machines and material handling equipment have been designed and manufactured for various applications. The facility layout optimization is one of the major tasks in designing automated systems. This paper proposes a generic methodology that provides a systematic way to design an optimal layout for all types of automated facilities. The quantitative design criteria of automatic material processing machines and material handling equipment are addressed first. An optimal connectivity among machines is then solved through topology approach and heuristic algorithm. Thus, an optimized facility layout can be derived and completed by combining the optimal topology connectivity, physical constraints, and designer's preference.

A technique for the calibration of an active camera system is presented. The calibration of manipulator, camera-to-manipulator, camera, and base-to-world is treated in a unified and elegant way. In this approach, the camera frames and manipulator link frames are all related to the world frame, therefore the camera-to-manipulator and base-to-world calibration is very straightforward. The approach is simple, since it uses the form of one equation solving one parameter. Two experiments that verify the accuracy of the technique are reported.>

To operate autonomous vehicles safely, obstacles must be detected before any path planning and obstacle avoidance activity is undertaken. In the paper, a novel approach to obstacle detection is developed. New visual linear invariants based on optical flow have been developed. Employing the linear invariance property, obstacles an be directly detected by using a reference flow line obtained from measured optical flow. This method can be used for ground vehicles to navigate through man-made roadways or natural outdoor terrain or for air vehicles to land on known or unknown terrain.>

An adaptive control scheme for the tip position control of a single-link flexible manipulator handling unknown changing loads and its experimental verification are presented. The scheme essentially comprises a least-squares identification algorithm and a self-tuning pole-placement controller. The controller uses a novel recursive algorithm which constrains the control signal not to respond immediately to any sudden changes in the control gains due to changes in the parameter estimate vector. Another salient feature of the present work is the observation of a 'ringing effect' transient during payload release and its resolution. This was achieved by a resetting of the parameter estimate vector to its no-load value, prior to payload release. A performance comparison of the new adaptive control with a constant-gain pole placement controller as well as a standard self-tuning pole placement controller clearly demonstrates its superior ability in handling unknown changing loads.>