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Over the past 40 years Faye Crosby's research, teaching, and mentorship has touched and influenced students, researchers, and academic institutions. Faye's early work focused on gender inequity and relative deprivation, providing her with insight into a surprising phenomenon – the denial of personal discrimination. Armed with the knowledge that individuals are often unaware of personal discrimination, Faye's later work focused on advocating for institutional protections in the form of affirmative action. The focus of this interview is to simultaneously pay homage to Faye's innovative research while highlighting the ways that Faye's motivations, inspirations, and personal experiences have influenced her body of work.

This article is based on an interview with Faye Crosby by the authors in October of 2006.

Faye Crosby's work in the field of social psychology has influenced a great deal of social justice inquiry, including research related to gender equity, discrimination, relative deprivation, mentoring, and affirmative action. She describes herself as a social psychologist and a feminist empiricist. She asserts that her greatest contribution to the field is her ability to organize and categorize research findings in novel ways, elucidating new themes. Faye has published over 150 articles, books, and chapters both individually and in collaboration.

This retrospective account updates previous interviews of the prominent scholar, Faye Crosby, whose life work has been dedicated to social justice and equal access to opportunities.

In a review of America's capital investment system, Michael Porter concluded that the most critical determinant of competitive advantage is “sustained investment in physical as well as intangible assets, things like employee skills and supplier relationships” (1992: 65). Why supplier relationships? This study measures firm returns associated with one form of interfirm investment—stock blockholdings—and tests how investing firm returns are affected by alternative measures of firm size.

To demonstrate the feasibility of designing a versatile packaging machine for folding cartons of complex geometry and shapes.

The research conducts study of cartons of different geometry and shapes classifying them in suitable types and operations that a machine can understand, conceptualizing a machine that can handle such cartons, modeling and simulation of the machine, and finally design and development of the packaging machine.

It has been shown that such a versatile machine is a possibility; it just needs miniaturization and investment on its development when such machines could be a reality.

This research was aimed at proving the principle, but for practical implementation considerations need to be given for a compact, portable system incorporating sensors.

The design is unique in existence and has been shown to fold cartons of different complexity.

To report on new products and applications at the 2005 International Robots and Vision Show, Chicago, USA.

A brief description of some of the highlights of the exhibition.

Robots are becoming faster and cheaper.

The article is of value to those interested in developments in robotics and machine vision.

This paper provides a general review of automated processing methods currently being used to fabricate aircraft composite structure.

Presents a description of the Automated Tape Layer (ATL) process and the Fiber Placement (FP) process. These processes are the most “automated” of all processes being used to fabricate composite aircraft structure. Fiber Placement machines and Automated Tape Layers are composites machine tools and they are the closest comparison the composites industry has to metals machining equipment.

There is a need for more variety of composites automation and more affordable machines in the aerospace composites industry. The limited variety of automation and the cost of equipment tend to limit the spread of automation throughout the aerospace composites industry. ATL and FP are composites laminating technologies that could be adapted to a wide range of machine sizes, configurations, and price ranges.

More widespread use of automated processes in composites would tend to lower the cost of composite aircraft structure on a global basis.

To describe the design methodology and human‐centre functionality of the whole arm manipulator (WAM) developed originally at MIT and brought to commercial fruition by Barrett Technology.

The WAM arm is driven by cable‐and‐cylinder transmissions, which uniquely exhibits zero backlash with low friction and low inertia, endowing the WAM with good open‐loop “backdrivability”. Two key benefits of the high backdrivability are: motion control through joint torque control, which enables the intrinsic sensing of forces over the whole arm and makes it inherently safe to humans; operation directly in the Cartesian domain without the need for inverse kinematics calculations, providing very rapid responsiveness as demonstrated in the “baseball robot” of Tokyo University. Another benefit of the WAM is its kinematic redundancy through the 4‐dof (degrees‐of‐freedom) main axes (7‐dof with the wrist). Recent major advances in the WAM include the “puck”, the world's smallest fully‐featured servo‐controller that eliminates the need for an external controller cabinet, and a safety circuit that limits, by a set amount, the power flow from the WAM to a person or object while not inhibiting the reverse from human to arm. The WAM's intrinsic force control has allowed the development of software‐defined haptic walls, which are being exploited by partners such as the CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) Robotics Institute, in patient rehabilitation, and Mako Surgical, for use in joint surgery.

The Barrett WAM's good open‐loop backdrivability has initiated the development of novel human‐centred robot applications that will expand the use of robots outside the factory and into human‐inhabited areas.

Presents the design methodology, features and applications of the Barrett WAM human‐centred robot.

Aims to review the Clawar 2005 conference on climbing and walking robots.

Selects key papers from the conference and presents a brief outline of the research undertaken and the conclusions reached.

Speakers told of the latest developments in humanoid robots; space applications; personal assistance robots; and NDT, security and surveillance. Sessions also covered innovations in sensing and sensor fusion; climbing, navigation and path planning, gait generation, manipulation; hopping and legged robots; flexible manipulators; and control.

Outlines trends in the development of climbing and walking robots.

To review manufacturing automation products and technology on show at Interplas 2005, the UK's premier exhibition of equipment for the plastics and rubber industry.

Some of the automation products on display at the show are highlighted, particularly the take‐out or beam‐type robots favoured by several of the injection moulding machine (IMM) manufacturers who produce their own version of these robots, including Arburg and Negri Bossi. Descriptions are also given of products from some independent automation equipment manufacturers including ATM, Geiger Handling and Wittmann. Beam‐type and articulated arm robots are described as well as end‐of‐arm tooling including CaviGrip exhibited by ATM, which through cooling within the tool can achieve dramatic savings by reducing the cycle time of IMMs. The contrasting benefits of beam‐type and articulated arm robots tending IMMs are debated. Also revealed is new articulated arm robot hardware and software technology developed by ABB specifically for plastics manufacturing automation. Finally, a brief case study is presented of a robot cell at Characteristix, a UK manufacturer of injection mouldings for the entertainment industry, which has helped it compete against the Far East.

There are manufacturing automation products available to the plastics industry that can help lift it out of recession. Articulated arm robots can add significant value to injection moulded products.

Presents a review of the manufacturing automation technology now available to the plastics manufacturing industry.

To relate how even a smaller manufacturing operation can benefit from the application of robotic methods to manual operations.

A maker of fibreglass automobile body kits called in a robotic systems integrator with 20 years of experience to automate his manual panel trimming operation. In about three months, the system integrator delivered a complete system to meet all application requirements.

The auto body kit maker achieved a 95 percent reduction in trimming time and improved his quality as well.

While this manufacturer achieved dramatic benefits, not all trimming operations might achieve such results.

Key to a successful robot application can depend heavily on the skills and prior experience of the system integrator selected to address the application.

May provide incentive to other smaller fiberglass panel manufacturers to examine potential applications where robotic trimming systems could provide excellent pay back on the investment.