Editorial: Advances in Steel Manufacturing and Processing

Advances in agile manufacturing

An agile workcell has been developed for light mechanical assembly in collaboration with industrial sponsors. The workcell includes multiple Adept robots, a Bosch conveyor system, multiple flexible parts feeders at each robot’s workstation, CCD cameras for parts feeding and hardware registration, and a dual VMEbus control system. Our flexible parts feeder design uses multiple conveyors to singu...

Editorial: Nanotechnological Advances in Biosensors

A biosensor is a physicochemical or hybrid physical-chemical-biological device that detects a biological molecule, organism, or process. Because of the nature of their targets, biosensors need to be faster, smaller, more sensitive, and more specific than nearly all of their physicochemical counterparts or the traditional methods that they are designed to replace. Speed is of the essence in medi...

Editorial: Advances in Ascochyta Research

Advances in Ergonomics in Manufacturing

This case study reports on the quality assessment of a drilling cabin (i.e., a dog house) by using a Participatory Ergonomics (PE) approach to the Heuristic Evaluation (HE) compared to an operators’ self-reported measurement. In the quality assessment, self-reported rating techniques are broadly used by Human Factors (HF) practitioners with the aim of investigating the subjective components (e....

Visualizing the Future in Steel Manufacturing

Computer simulation and virtual reality visualization have evolved to become critical emerging technologies in creating immersive virtual environments for numerous fields. The ability to allow people to "go inside" these virtual environments provides a unique, and effective tool for understanding complex physical processes, and thus to innovate and to make significant improvements in a time and...