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Successful use of automatic assembly in industry will require not only a complete re‐thinking, re‐assessment and evolutionary interaction but it will also demand that everything peripheral to the machine be considered as well.

Industrial robots bear little resemblance to the science fiction concept of futuristic machines — they are little more than machine tools except that their prime function is handling not making components. Being designed to replace a human operator, many of the machines currently available are somewhat similar in scale to a human being although their continuous weight lifting abilities can be much in excess of a human. They generally have one manipulating arm and there are three classical types of robot architecture:

WHEN Professor W. B. Heginbotham, Director General of the Production Engineering Research Association, officially opens Tribo‐International 80 at Bodington Hall, Leeds, on Tuesday morning, September 16, he will set in motion the fourth and biggest Exhibition in the biennial series staged by the Leeds Tribology Unit. The event, which has come to be called the “moving parts show”, is a commercial exhibition providing visitors with a rare opportunity of seeing all aspects of lubrication, bearings seals and allied equipment presented under one roof at the same time.

IN the run‐up period to the close of the year 1981 a White Paper on training was issued by the Government. In it was a sentence that could be called astonishing these days when academic ability is reckoned so highly. It said bluntly “Access to skilled work, or training to higher levels, should depend not on the form and structure of previous training but on proven ability”.

A non‐contact end‐effector was applied to lift three different materials which have different physical properties. These materials are mica (as rigid material), carton (as semi‐rigid material) and non‐rigid material (woven fabric). This end‐effector operates on the principle of generating a high‐speed air flow between nozzles and the specimen surface thereby creating a vacuum which levitates the materials with no mechanical contact. In this paper, the handling results of these materials are compared with each other. The changes in the physical behavior of lifting materials were observed during the experimental work. The effect of the various air flow rates on the non‐contact handling clearance gap between the nozzle and the materials were also investigated. As a result, it was observed that the non‐contact end‐effector could be applied to handle different flat materials.