Assembly Automation and Product Design

Addressing design for automated and manual assembly processes, Boothroyd (industrial and manufacturing engineering, University of Rhode Island) examines assembly automation in parallel with product design. He enumerates the components, processes, performance, and comparative economics of several types of automatic assembly systems, providing information on equipment such as transfer devices, parts feeders, placing mechanisms, and robots. The book includes 500 drawings, tables, and equations, plus numerous problems and laboratory experiments that reinforce essential concepts. This second edition contains, as an appendix, the Handbook of Feeding and Orienting Techniques for Small Parts. This edition also includes the original data and coding systems for product design for high-speed automatic and robot assembly developed at the University of Massachusetts.