A wheel scriber that can operate in scanning electron microscope (SEM) was developed. This system enabled the microscopic observation of contact area between a scribing wheel and a glass substrate. In this study, a diamond wheel with notches on the ridge line was used for the scribing experiment. By comparison between experimental results using our scriber and a commercially available scriber (i.e. industrially used scriber), it was confirmed that the fractured surface morphology obtained by these scribers showed good agreements. For both scribers, a hackle-mark with irregular cracks appeared near the scribed surface at low applied load conditions. In contrast, a rib-mark with periodic patterns was observed under the high applied load conditions. Observation results of contact areas between wheel and glass surface provided the accurate values of contact length and penetration depth. In addition, SEM images showed the difference in crack generation behaviors around indentations formed by the notched wheel under high and low applied loads.

The grinding wheel is comprised by three elements; abrasive grain, bonding material and pore, which are specified by five factors; type of abrasive grain, grain size, type of bonding material, grade of hardness and abrasive grain volume percentage. Regarding the abrasive grain, it is well known that shape and number of cutting edge significantly effects grinding performance such as surface roughness, grinding force and grinding wheel life. In general, abrasive grain size is determined by mean diameter of abrasive grain. However, the abrasive grains in a grinding wheel are randomly scraggly in size and shape. There is no particular aspect to regulate the grain size variation in JIS (Japanese Industrial Standards). This paper investigates the effect of grain size variation on the ground surface topography by actual grinding on silicon wafers and analysis based on grinding simulation. The results reveal that the standard deviation of grain size is a very important index to characterize the grinding performance of a wheel. Smaller standard deviation leads to larger density of effective cutting-edge under the same volume percentage of abrasive grain contained in the wheel. This fact significantly contributes to not only achieve a better surface roughness and more uniform surface integrity, but also shorten the finishing time.

This paper describes newly developed non-foaming polishing pads for polishing glassware. A polyamide-based epoxy resin instead of a conventional polyamine-based epoxy resin or a polyurethane resin, is employed. The polyamide-based epoxy resin has a beneficial effect on hydrophilic property and abrasive retention of polishing pads. It was found that the material removal rate of glass using the polyamide-based epoxy-resin polishing pad is higher than that using the polyamine-based epoxy-resin pad or the commercially available polyurethane-resin polishing pad. It was confirmed that the surface roughness of glass polished by the novel polyamide-based epoxy-resin pads is better than that polished by the urethane pad. The contained amount of polyamide-based curing agent in polyamide-based epoxy-resin polishing pads was altered, but not changed the hardness of polishing pads by adjusting mixing ratio of polyamine-based curing agents. The material removal rate increases with the amount of polyamide-based curing agent contented in epoxy resin. What’s more, the reason of high material removal rate with using the polyamide-based epoxy-resin polishing pad was also investigated. The contact angles of slurry on polishing pads and the surface states of various pads after polishing test were measured. The results showed that, the hydrophilicity of polyamide-based epoxy-resin pads is higher and a finer concave-convex surface generates in polishing process. The hydrophilicity and the finer concave-convex surface are suitable for polishing pads to improving the polishing performance. The surface states of polishing pads can be altered with mixing more than two kinds of curing agents in epoxy resin.

Robots in dynamic environments are required to acquire distance information autonomously to work as a substitute for humans. One method for achieving this is the stereo vision method, which uses two or more lenses with a separate image sensor. However, it is not always possible to measure distances in real environments using this approach, as the camera cannot track an object that is occluded by an environmental obstacle. This paper presents a high-speed and stable visual tracking control approach for a stereo vision robot that can maintain continuous operation even under such occluded conditions. The proposed approach adopts a particle filter to estimate the position of a moving object in the horizontal plane, and the stereo vision robot is controlled to continue to track the object in the center of the camera image according to the estimation. In evaluation experiments, our approach demonstrated sufficient performance in visual tracking control for a periodic moving object in the absence of occlusions, and hence is almost equivalent to an image-based approach. Furthermore, even when the camera was intermittently occluded, the approach exhibited small tracking errors as long as the duration of the occlusion was less than 7.5% of the moving period of the object. The method is hence sufficiently sophisticated for visual tracking control in actual environments.

Shapes of everyday objects are designed to achieve the predefined purpose of use. In this research, we call various kind of inherent functions as ”part-affordance”, and we have developed the method to perceive it from point cloud captured by a depth sensor. Difficulty of the estimation of it is that same local surfaces do not always have same affordance. In order to deal with this issue, we propose a method which integrates the evidence generated by local feature while considering the continuity of surface structure. Our experiments using a publicly available datasets confirmed that the proposed method have increased the recognition rate from 57% to 73% in comparison with the previous method. Moreover, we demonstrated that the robot arm can perform the task according to estimated part-affordances.

Manufacturing precision electronic parts, it is judged by automatic inspection machines whether there are defects in the electronic components or not. Along with the requirement for higher sensitivity of inspection, some defect candidates judged by the inspection machine include many good products, which cause excessive detection of non-defective products. This study aims to develop an effective method classifying defect candidate images into defect images and non-defect images. In this paper, the influence of defect of electronic component on HOG feature is evaluated, and the results showing the possibility of highly accurate defect identification are reported.

This study proposes a new reduction method of tool collision check time for multi axis controlled machining. The collision check and avoidance are essential to generate the tool path for multi axis controlled machining. Then, much time is required to calculate the collision areas to the workpiece that has complex machining surfaces and narrow non-collision areas such as an impeller. In our approach, free-formed surfaces representing machining surfaces with NURBS are simplified to first order or second order surfaces based on two strategies, i.e. reduction of control points and order. However, since simple reduction of control points and orders leads to the completely different shape from the original shape, both parameters have to be controlled appropriately by keeping errors caused by the simplification operation minimum. This paper presents the simplification methods with suppressing simplification errors, and its effectiveness is verified.