Abstract
In 1999,our research group in MEL designed a prototype microfactory which consists of three miniature machine tools and two manipulators. Three machine tools are the micro lathe which was developed in 1996,the micro press machine and the micro milling machine. The paper first mentions the effort to develop the microfactory and it's components that potentially reduces energy consumption and space occupied by the manufacturing system for micro mechanical fabrication. The paper also describes a robust design procedure for machine tools, combining the form-shaping theory with the Taguchi method. The study applies the procedure that can estimate the machine tool performance without prototyping, to the miniature machine tools designed for the microfactory. It analyzes the effect that the local errors, the design parameters and the design concept of the miniature machine tools have on its machining performance. The results lead us to conclude that the procedure is a powerful tool to get design suggestions enable better tolerances.
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