Precision manufacturing is a development that has been gathering momentum over the last century and accelerating over the last 25 years in terms of research, development, and application to product innovation. The driving force in this development arises from requirements for much higher performance of products, higher reliability, longer life, lower cost, and miniaturization. This development is widely known as precision engineering and, today, it is generally defined as manufacturing to tolerances which are better than one part in 105. Applications are abound and can be found in various semiconductor processes (e.g., lithography, wafer probing, inspection), Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs) and precision metrology systems (e.g., Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM)), and robot/machine tools to carry out micro-assembly (e.g., MEMS) and delicate short wavelength laser processes.
As an enabling technology for precision engineering, precision instrumentation and measurement, geometrical calibration and compensation, and motion control are directly important issues to be addressed in the overall system design and realization. This book is focused on these aspects of precision engineering. It is a compilation of the major results and publications from a major project which develop a state-of-the-art high-speed, ultra-precision robotic system. A comprehensive and thorough treatment of the subject matter is provided in a manner that is amenable to a broad base of readers, ranging from the academics to the practitioners, by providing detailed experimental verifications of the developed materials.
