Since the first DIISM conference, which took place 9 years ago, the world has seen drastic changes, including the transformation of manufacturing and engineering software, and the information and communication technologies deployed. The conditions for manufacturing and engineering have changed on a large scale, in terms of technology-enabled collaboration among the fields of design, engineering, production, usage, maintenance and recyclingldisposal. These changes can be observed in rapidly-growing fields such as supply chain management. As for production technologies at factory floors, new visions on human-machine co-existing systems involve both knowledge management and multi-media technologies. Therefore, because of these changes, the importance of information infrastructure for manufacturing has increased, stunningly. Information infrastructure plays a key role in integrating diverse fields of manufacturing, engineering and management. This, in addition to its basic role, as the information and communication platform for the production systems. Eventually, it should also serve the synthetic function of knowledge management, during the life cycles of both the production systems and their products, and for all stakeholders.

The book includes 61 selected papers from 106 presented at the second International Conference on Machine Automation (ICMA2000). The conference focused, for the first time, on human friendly mechantronics which covers machine systems interacting with human beings, psychological, physiological, and physical behaviors of the human being itself, robotics, human-mimetic mechanical systems, commercial application examples and so on. Machine automation has owed a lot to mechatronics technology in the last decades, however, a paradigm shift is desired and emphasized in the 21st century in every aspect of our society, and mechantronics is not an exception. The paradigm shift in mechatronics is a pursuit of productivity and efficiency to the preference of humans, and it is time that a new concept of a human friendly robot must be proposed that is welcome by human users. The book aims to offer the most up-to-date and valuable information on:
Human Interface & Communication
Human Support Technology
Actuator & Control
Vision & Sensing
Robotics and Design
Manufacturing System
We believe this book will bring advanced knowledge and valuable information to the industries as well as to academics and will contribute to the further development in mechatronics and its related fields.
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