Richard Leach attended the International Precision Assembly Seminar
Richard Leach attended the International Precision Assembly Seminar (IPAS) at the Majestic Conference Centre, Chamonix, France from 13th to 15th January 2018. Organised by the University of Nottingham’s Institute for Advanced Manufacturing (IfAM) and helmed by IfAM director Professor Svetan Ratchev, the seminar featured twenty presentations, two keynote addresses and a dissemination session for the Horizon 2020 project OPTIMISED. While previous IPAS seminars have focused on precision assembly at the micro-scale, this year’s theme explored the importance of precision assembly to larger assembly domains. The first keynote address was given by Dr Graham Herries, Director of Digital Technologies at multinational construction and civil engineering company Laing O’Rourke, and described the revolution occurring in modern construction, where digital technologies and extensive 3D modelling are now required to achieve millimetre precision in extremely large construction projects. Day two saw the second keynote given by Dr Luis Ribeiro, Associate Professor in Manufacturing Engineering of Linköping University in Sweden. The talk addressed design challenges in cyber-physical assembly systems, and the importance of not just capturing data in assembly, but also having a system architecture that can use it to achieve improvements in precision and cost. The importance of system-wide intelligence and information exchange to precision assembly was highlighted in several of the presentations given at the seminar.
Richard presented an oral paper entitled “Information-rich manufacturing metrology” and chaired a session.
Dr Graham Herries, Director of Digital Technologies at Laing O’Rourke reports on the status of the Horizon 2020 project OPTIMISED.
Dr Luis Ribeiro, Associate Professor in Manufacturing Engineering at Linköping University in Sweden gives his keynote address “Cyber-Physical Assembly Systems: Beyond the Technological Hype, the Persisting Design Challenges”.