A gerotor pump is suitable for oil hydraulics of machine tools, automotive engines, compressors, constructions and other various applications, which are highly accepted by designers. Especially the pump is an essential machine element of an automotive engine to feed lubricant oil. However, related industries do not have necessary technology to design and optimize the pump and paid royalties of rotor profile on an advanced country. Also, gerotor pumps with unsettled design parameters have not been sufficiently analyzed from a theoretical view of design. Therefore, it is still very difficult for the pump designer and manufacturer to decide the specifications for the required gerotor pump by users.
In this study, the design optimization has been carried out to determine the design parameters that maximize the specific flow rate and minimize the flow rate irregularity. Theoretical analyses and optimal design of the gerotor oil pump have been performed by mathematical base, numerical method and knowledge of kinematics. An automated design system of the tooth profile has been developed through AutoLlSP language and CAD method considering various design parameters. Finally, an optimally designed model for a general type of a gerotor pump has been generated and experimentally verified for the pump performances.

In this paper, wire electrochemical machining (Wire ECM) with ultra short pulses is presented. Platinum wire with 10 ㎛ diameter was used as a tool and 304 stainless steel was locally dissolved by electrochemical machining in 0.1 M H₂SO₄ electrolyte. Wire ECM can be easily applied to the fabrication of arbitrarily shaped micro-grooves without tool wear. The change of machining gap according to applied pulse voltage, pulse on-time and pulse period was investigated and the optimal pulse condition for stable machining was obtained. Using this method, various micro-grooves with less than 20 urn width were fabricated.

The purpose of this research is to find a simple and accurate NURBS interpolator for CNC systems such as robot, CMM and CNC machine tools. This paper presents a new design of NURBS interpolator for CNC system. The proposed algorithm used the recursive characteristics of NURBS equation, the previous incremental value and chord length for the sake of a constant chord length. Simulation study was conducted to see the performance of the proposed interpolator with reference-word and reference-pulse method. Consequently, an accurate and simple NURBS interpolator was possible for modern CNC systems.

This paper presents mainly a procedure to get the mathematical form of the manufactured aspherical lens. Generally Schulz formula describes the aspherical lens profile. Therefore, the base curvature, conic constant, and high-order polynomial coefficient should be set to get the approximated design equation. To find the best-approximated aspherical form, lens profile is measured by a commercial stylus profiler, which has a sub-micrometer measurement resolution. The optimization tool is based on the minimization of the root mean square of error sum to get the estimated aspherical surface equation from the scanned aspherical profile. Error minimization step uses the Nelder-Mead simplex (direct search) method. The result of the lens refractive power measurement shows the experimental consistency with the curvature distribution of the best-approximated aspherical surface equation.

When an almost flat surface under test is measured by an interferometer, the measurement result is largely influenced by systematic errors that include geometrical errors of a reference flat surface.
To determine the systematic errors of the interferometer by the conventional method that is called the three flat method, we must take the reference flat surface out from the interferometer and measure it. Because of difficulties to set the reference flat surface to the interferometer exactly and quickly, this method is not practical.
On the other hand, the method that measures a surface under test with some shifts in the direction being perpendicular to the optical axis of the interferometer is studied. However, the parasitic pitching, rolling and up-down movement caused by the above shifts brings serious error to the measurement result, and the algorithm by which the influences can be eliminated is not still established.
In this paper, we propose the self-calibration algorithm for determining the systematic errors that include geometrical errors of a reference flat surface by several rotation shifts and a linear shift of general surface under test, and verify by a numerical experiment that this algorithm is useful for determining the systematic errors.

Gearing system emits inconsistent noise from gear teeth impact in case of gear defects. But, it is not easy for inspection operator in production line to distinguish objectively the defective product. Therefore, customer complains continuously bad noise of the geared motor. Because impulsive signal at low frequency has a tendency not to appear in frequency domain, it is difficult to separate the gear inconsistent noise of defective gear from overall geared motor's noise using general signal processing method such as FFT. In this paper, the method to estimate more objectively the inconsistent noise of gearing system and to measure the quantities is suggested. Suggested method uses Cepstrum, Autocorrelation, Comb Lifter and Inverse Cepstrum by turns to make objective quantities about noise level.

Optical performance evaluation results and an interference fringe pattern analysis of alignment errors for an optical head of a near-field recoding (NFR) system are presented. The focusing unit is an optical head of a NFR system and is composed of a solid immersion lens (SIL) and an objective lens (OL). Generally, the size of the focusing unit is smaller than that of the conventional optical recording head. Hence there are difficulties to assemble the small focusing unit precisely. We composed an evaluation system with an interferometer and evaluated some focusing unit samples aligned and assembled by manual and present the obtained results. Using the conventional optical tool, CodeV, a tolerance analysis of the alignment error between the SIL and the objective lens and an interference pattern analysis for the assembly error are executed. Then, through an analysis of the simulation results, the conceptual auto-alignment methodology using a neural network approach is considered.

This paper presents the development of a virtual robot design program. Robot design requires numerical software, robot solution software and multi-body dynamics software to complete several designs. However using a commercialized software implies some disadvantages, such as the waste of time and money it costs to learn how to use the software.
We developed a virtual robot design program with which a user can design a robot with rapidity and reliability. The virtual robot design program is composed of robot kinematics module and robot dynamics module. The program is powerful software which may be used to solve various problems of a robot. The 3D animator and a 2D/3D graph of the program can analyze the design results into visual data. The virtual robot design program is expected to increase the competitiveness and efficiency of the robot industry.

The coordination of locomotion and manipulation has been the typical and main issue for a mobile manipulator. This is particularly because the solution for the control parameters is redundant and the accuracies of controlling the each joints are different. This paper presents a motion planning method for which the mobile base locomotion is less precise than the manipulator control. In such a case, it is appropriate to move the mobile base to discrete poses and then to move the manipulator to track a prescribed path of the end effector, while the base is stationary. It uses a variant of the conventional manipulability measure that is developed for the trajectory control of the end effector of the mobile manipulator along an arbitrary path in the three dimensional space. The proposed method was implemented on the simulation and the experiments of a mobile manipulator and showed its effectiveness.

This paper presents one-axis high precision scanning system and illustrates the design of modified X-Y-θ stage as a tracker using VCM and commercialized air bearings for it. The scanning system for 100㎚ resolution is composed of the 3-axis stage and one axis long stroke linear motor stage as a follower. In this study a previous proposed and presented structure of VCM for the fine stage is modified. The tracker has 3 DOF(X-Y-θ) motions by four VCM actuators which are located on the same plane. So 4 actuating forces are suggested and designed to create least pitch and roll motions. This article will show about the design especially about optimal design. The design focus of this fine stage is to have high acceleration to accomplish high throughput. The optimal design of maximizing acceleration is performed in restrained size. The most sensitive constraint of this optimal design is heat dissipation of coil. There are 5 design variables. Because the relationship between design variables and system parameters are quite complicated, it is very difficult to set design variables manually. Due to it, computer based optimal design procedure using MATLAB is used. Then, this paper also describes the procedures of selecting design variables for the optimal design and a mathematical formulation of the optimization problem. Based on the solution of the optimization problem, the final design of the stage is also presented. The results can be verified by MAXWELL. The designed stage has the acceleration of about 5 ㎨ with 40㎏ total mass including wafer chuck and interferometer mirror. And the temperature of coil is increased 50°C. In addition, the tracker is controlled by high precision controller system with HP interferometer for it and linear scaler for the follower. At that time, the scanning system has high precision resolution about 5㎚ and scanning resolution about 40㎚ in 25㎜/s constant speed.

Because of the turbulent markets and the increasing demand on product quality, the application of new technology to practice is increasingly important. In case of automotive industries, they take interest in laser welding to solve these problems because laser welding has many advantages such as good accessibility, welding quality, fast welding speed and so on. To apply this technology to welding of car body, the data of laser welding are collected through lots of the experiment according to the material, geometry and layer number of welding points. Based on the experiment results and the information of product, i.e. the car side panel, the clustering of stitches for laser welding was carried out and the optimal equipments are selected through the comparison between the requirements of welding and the potential of equipments. Using these results, laser welding cell for the car side panel are configured with the concept of the digital manufacturing, which ensures maximum planning security with visualization and simulation. Finally, the optimal laser welding cell is chosen by the evaluation of alternative cells with assessment criteria.

Lever mechanisms are usually employed to enlarge output displacements in precision stages. In this study, theoretical analysis is done for a precision stage employing a lever and flexure hinges, including bending effect. This study presented relations between design parameters and magnification ratio. This study presents optimal values for the parameters to achieve a longer stage displacement. The analysis is verified by finite element analysis. It is found that adjusting stiffnesses can increase the travel range significantly.