The Automated Craftsman Preliminary Research

The Automated Craftsman is a combination of efforts that have resulted from our past work with Westinghouse, our new work with the Expert Machinist Consortium and current support from the Air Force. The Air Force project is called the Intelligent Machining Workstation (IMW) and as such is the major research catalyst for our group. The IMW project’s major goal is to replace the skills of the metal working craftsman in order to make the first part right. The chapters in this report outline the preliminary research of the IMW group to achieve this end, while integrating the results into the general objectives of the laboratory: The Automated Craftsman. The results reported here indicate a strong need to use hybrid qualitative and quantitative methods for process planning, process control, process monitoring (Le., sensors) and workholding (Le., fixtures and grippers). To accomplish this, we have knowledge engineered the methods of the human craftsman and as appropriate encoded their methods. Finally, we review available workstations in consideration of the IMWs implementation.