A Study on a Microfactory and an Evaluation Method of its System Configuration

This paper first describes the concept of a microfactory and its design basics. The microfactory is a desktop-type miniature manufacturing system consists of miniature machine tools and manipulators. Since the prototyped microfactory was able to perform the whole process of machining parts and assembling them to a miniature ball bearing, it was able to say that it has a significant capability for micro mechanical fabrication. However, the possibility of the microfactory to improve manufacturing efficiencies of micro mechanical fabrications has not been considered enough. In the paper, the author proposes an evaluation method to calculate efficiencies of the system based on the required time for each process, obtained in the above-mentioned microfactory project. The paper also tries to propose a concept of flexible design of the products, manufacturing processes and system configurations, utilizing the advantage of a microfactory-like system