These are exciting times for manufacturing engineers. It has been said that American industry will undergo greater changes during the 1980 and 1990 decades than it did during the entire eight preceding decades of this century. The industrial robot has become the symbol of this progress in computer-integrated manufacturing. This book is for engineers and managers in manufacturing industries who are involved in implementing robotics in their operations. With tens of thousands of industrial robots already in use in the United States, there are plenty of role models for proposed applications to be patterned after. This book provides an overview of robot applications and presents case histories that might suggest applications to engineers and managers for implementation in their own facilities. The application of industrial robots were well developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While the reader may note some of the examples discussed in this handbook incorporate older robot models, it is the application that is of interest. As Joseph Engelberger, the founding father of robotics has pointed out, industrial robots in 1988 are "doing pretty much the same kind of work" as they did in 1980.
