Artificial intelligence systems in micromechanics

Abstract

Some of the artificial intelligence (AI) methods could be used to improve the automation system performance in manufacturing processes. However, the implementation of these AI methods in the industry is rather slow, because of the high cost of the experiments with the conventional manufacturing and AI systems. To lower the experiment cost in this field, we have developed a special micromechanical equipment, similar to conventional mechanical equipment, but of much smaller size and therefore of lower cost. This equipment could be used for evaluation of different AI methods in an easy and inexpensive way. The proved methods could be transferred to the industry through appropriate scaling. In this paper we describe the prototypes of low cost microequipment for manufacturing processes and some AI method implementations to increase its precision, like computer vision systems based on neural networks for microdevice assembly, and genetic algorithms for microequipment characterization and microequipment precision increase. © 2004 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.